Arikia Millikan | The Verge

Scientists find weird new property of matter that breaks all the rules

2013-02-18T18:55:26-05:00

Mobius strip

When physicists discover new properties of matter, it usually means better technologies for the rest of us. Superconductors, liquid crystal displays like the ones found in most TVs now, medical imaging technologies that allow doctors to peer inside the human body, and magnetic levitation — which was used to create the Shanghai Maglev train — are all examples of how discoveries of new properties of matter have resulted in revolutionary products.

Now, physicists have discovered another new property of matter that could lead to a new generation of innovation.

Physicists are always on the lookout for new ways electrons can push each other around

For the past 25 years, physicists observed a persistent glitch while conducting experiments that involved cooling a uranium compound to near absolute zero. When the compound, URu₂Si₂, was cooled to -428 degrees Fahrenheit, they would see a fall in the amount of chaos in the system. The molecules seemed to snap into an ordered state, letting out a burst of heat the scientists couldn’t account for. Where did this extra heat come from?

The likely answer, which was detailed in a paper published January 30th in Nature by Rutgers physics professors Piers Coleman, Premala Chandra and MIT postdoc Rebecca Flint, comes from the observation that this material was undergoing a phase transition (similar to how water undergoes a phase transition when it becomes ice) but at the quantum level, reflecting a property of matter that was previously unknown.

In the quest to find new materials with exotic properties such as superconductivity, physicists are always on the lookout for new ways electrons can push each other around. For example, last week scientists announced they’d created a new kind of solar cell by discovering new electronic properties using a large-scale computer simulation. To discover properties that occur under more extreme conditions, theoretical physicists like Coleman write the equations that are sent over to experimental physicists who run tests using devices like the Large Hadron Collider to see if they hold up. “Along the way, we sometimes stumble across something amazing like high temperature superconductivity, which works well for levitating trains,” Coleman said.

New physical properties are characterized by breaks in physical symmetries, which we can see in everyday things. If you rotate a sphere around its axis, it looks the same at every point in the rotation — but if you rotate a cube this way, it only looks the same every 90 degrees of rotation. Therefore, a cube breaks continuous rotational symmetry. Magnets exemplify a broken symmetry that is a bit more difficult to envision because it breaks what physicists call “time-reversal” symmetry. This is the idea that the motion of particles looks the same running back and forth in time, “like running a movie backwards and forward,” Coleman offered as a comparison. With magnets, if you run the movie backwards, the magnetic field produced reverses direction. You have to reverse time twice to get it back to its original state.

Hopefully this will involve teleportation, time travel, and more lasers

What the scientists observed was happening with this extremely cold uranium compound was that the substance was breaking double time-reversal symmetry — twice as complex as our magnet example. The physicists have dubbed this new property “hastatic order” after the ancient Latin word for “spear,” which is what the particles resemble in this ordered state. Obviously there’s no time-reversal machine to test this in, but data from particle colliders in the US and Japan has backed this theory. It’s kind of like finding the square root of -1: it technically doesn’t exist, but mathematically it helps solve all kinds of problems.

“It turns out that particles in nature divide into two categories. One has a property that when you time-reverse it, it comes back to itself,” Coleman explained, like a marble completing a lap around a circular track.

“Others, only when you time reverse it twice does it come back to itself.” Electrons have this property, the physical analogy for which is rolling a marble along a Möbius strip. One revolution brings it to the same place, but in an upside down orientation. Ars Technica writes about another good example.

The new theory of order, which involves the spin of electrons, breaks double time reversal symmetry and exhibits quadruple time reversal symmetry. Coleman warned there are no good physical examples, but I’d imagine it’s something like this:

So what are the implications of this new property? “This would be like asking Michael Faraday how his new work on electromagnetism would impact steam engines,” Coleman said, though he believes we are in the middle of “the quantum revolution” and anticipates great things to come. Hopefully that will involve teleportation, time travel, and more lasers.

“It took 200 years to understand classical mechanics and what energy was. Quantum mechanics is 100 years old, but there are ideas that we are just beginning to touch upon.”

Giant squid! To catch a monster, bring patience and plenty of cash

2013-01-25T11:27:04-05:00

giant squid

Giant squid – also known also by their scientific name Architeuthis – have been the stuff of both legend and science for hundreds of years. Stories of great tentacled Kraken in Scandinavia and in the scientific writings of Pliny the Elder are some of the earliest indications that such monsters were thought to exist. Giant squid have also left evidence of their existence tangled up in fishing nets and washed ashore all over the world. Despite their massive size (adults can grow up to about 40 feet from tip to tentacle and weigh up to 610 pounds) searching for them has been a needle-in-a-haystack endeavor.

The first video footage of a giant squid in its natural habitat will air this Sunday on the Discovery Channel in Monster Squid: The Giant is Real. The show is the culmination of years of searching, and a successful six-week expedition 550 miles south of Tokyo in June of 2012.

The search

“It’s not that they’ve been evading us,” explains Craig McClain, Assistant Director of Science National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and founder of Deep Sea News. “It’s more that our daily activities don’t overlap with their daily activities.”

Only around five percent of the oceans on Earth have been explored, and everything about the behavior of the elusive giant squid has been inferred from chance sightings at sea and dissecting beached carcases. Unlike its relative the humboldt squid which hunts in schools, the giant squid is thought to be a solitary creature. Also, until about twenty years ago, the best submersibles were made of opaque metals, and no camera could withstand the pressure and cold of the deepest waters.

Discovery and Japanese television company NHK began plotting the ultimate giant squid mission in 2006, but after watching repeated and fruitless attempts by National Geographic and others, there was hesitation about investing resources. But premiere squid scientists Tsunemi Kubodera of Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science, American oceanographer Edie Widder, and Kiwi renegade marine biologist Steve O’Shea convinced producers that they could find the squid. But they still needed the equipment.

Enter Ray Dalio, billionaire manager of the world’s largest hedge fund, who just happened to own a fully equipped research vessel. Dalio made his 56-meter motor yacht, the Alucia, available for NHK and Discovery to charter for the expedition, along with three submersible vessels, one of which is “the sexiest, most contemporary deep submersible that money can buy,” according to the manufacturers.

“He really just wanted to have an opportunity to go under water, just he and his family,” said Bruce Jones, CEO of Triton Subs, who manufactured the craft used to capture the footage. “Then he decided that since he had these assets, he might as well use them for some scientific progress.”

The team knew this was likely to be the last opportunity they had to search for the mythic creature, and on June 22nd, 2012, they boarded the Alucia and set off for six weeks afloat in the vast, blue sea.

To catch Architeuthis

Kubodera had captured still pictures of giant squid near the Ogasawara Islands, so the team used that as a starting point, setting sail from Sagami Bay.

Patrick Lahey, President of Triton Subs, joined the team on the Alucia to train the pilots and crew members in operating the submersibles. Three people would be in a submersible on every dive: a scientist, a photographer, and a pilot. During the six weeks they kept an around-the-clock schedule of missions. Each of the 55 jaunts below the surface lasted eight to 10 hours, and they took full advantage of the sub’s capabilities, often reaching its max depth of 1000 meters.

“You are down there and you are absolutely lost in time and space,” O’Shea said. Lahey says, “we all have to be a little bit crazy to do this,” because these expeditions are often emotionally and physically draining on crew members.

Even the world’s foremost giant squid researchers know virtually nothing about the way the giant squid behaves in its natural habitat, so they were forced to guess at how to lure it in front of a camera. Each of the researchers took a different approach, with success hinging on one main unknown: do giant squid prefer the lights on or off?

Widder, who has a PhD in Neurobiology and specializes in bioluminescence, sunk to the depths in the dark, extending a glass orb with flashing LEDs as bait. Her goal was to mimic the light display of a deep-sea jellyfish called atolla, which release a glowing chemical while being attacked. She’d observed that smaller squid were attracted to this jellyfish, but had never found any evidence that squid eat them. She concluded that squid were using the jellyfish as a “bioluminescent burglar alarm,” eating whatever was eating the jellyfish.

“You’ve got this small thing lighting up because this medium sized thing is munching on it, and the goal of the small thing is to get away from what’s eating it,” she explained.

Widder didn’t capture any video footage of Architeuthis while in the submersible, but she did capture five different recordings of giant squids by dangling a “Medusa” — her bioluminescent lures and a camera system — from a buoy on the surface.

O’Shea took a drastically different approach. He armed himself with a mixture of chemicals extracted from the mantles, arms and gonads of fully mature male and female giant squids, which he predicted would act as a pheromone to attract adults, and descended into the abyss “lights blazing, singing Neil Diamond, making as much noise as possible, squirting all sorts of chemicals into the water.” Why, if a major hypothesis of his respected colleague was that the giant squids have an aversion to white light? “Because I firmly believe that these squid don’t give a damn about light or sound.”

When it comes to speculation on the mental prowess of the giant squid, O’Shea is dismissive. “I think it’s one of the most stupid animals in the ocean. The only thing going through that 20 gram brain is eating and breeding.”

In his dives, O’Shea had lots of creatures attack the bait, and even the sub — on a 500 meter dive they once felt a thump from below and found themselves shrouded in a massive ink cloud. O’Shea saw more squid than anyone else during his dives with the lights on, but none were of the giant variety.

In the end, the successful approach was Kubodera’s, who descended like a deep-sea ninja, as quietly and invisibly as possible. Like Widder, he made use of the infrared lighting system and turned off everything electronic in the sub, including the temperature control system. He thought giant squids may be especially sensitive to sound vibrations. He sat staring out into the black abyss for eight hours at a time, cameras aimed at a diamond squid as bait.

And finally, on one lucky occasion, Architeuthis approached.

What followed was an inter-species staring competition. The squid explored the bait suspended in front of the sub, “sitting there for the most of 18 minutes looking beautiful,” as O’Shea put it.

O’Shea and Kubodera have held opposing hypotheses about the giant squid’s hunting behavior for as long as they’ve known each other, and were hoping that finally seeing it in motion would settle the bet once and for all.

Kubodera thought the animal would be an aggressive hunter darting around and quickly projecting its tentacles out to pull prey into its mouth. “I always thought that it was a dopey, giant thing that was floating at a 45 degree angle through the water column, dangling the two long tentacles down,” O’Shea said.

When they watched the video footage, each declared their own hypothesis confirmed. O’Shea says he shed a single tear when he saw the giant squid on video for the first time. “All I felt was overjoyed. It had now been done. We can now relax. We can now move on.”

Back on land, producers at Discovery are ecstatic for the giant squid’s 15 minutes, and grateful their gamble paid off. “Had we not succeeded I’m not sure anybody would have tried again,” said Christina Weber, VP for Production and Development for Specials at Discovery.

“Lights blazing, singing Neil Diamond, making as much noise as possible, squirting all sorts of chemicals into the water.”

To celebrate the discovery, Dalio flew famous biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins out to meet the research team on the yacht, which Dawkins later blogged about. While the scientists no doubt delighted in breaking new ground, their true bounty was the potential for the giant squid to act as an emblem of the deep, as a symbol with the power to convince the average television watcher of the necessity of preserving the earth’s oceans.

The question remains as to whether viewers will see the squid as majestic and beautiful, or as a monster like the show’s title asserts. “We are in the entertainment business. We don’t always want to preach to the choir,” Weber said, explaining that putting “monster” in the title was a ploy to lure in an audience beyond the scientific types who are already inclined to tune in.

“We’re driven to find all this weird and wonderful stuff on film for you guys, but at the same time what’s driving us is conservation. We use these charismatic megafauna as our hook to lure you into far more important matters,” O’Shea said. “People are going to see this on television and start giving a damn about the marine environment.”

The giant squid may have been the holy grail, but it wasn’t quite the final frontier. There is evidence of a squid even bigger than the giant squid out there called the colossal squid. Now that the elements for successful deep sea exploration voyages have been established, it’s only a matter of time before someone attempts to capture the colossal squid in Antarctica.

Why is Bigfoot eating bagels?

2012-12-18T13:10:04-05:00

bigfoot

Three weeks ago, a Texas-based geneticist created a media spectacle by claiming to have sequenced the DNA of the mythical Bigfoot, in what is most certainly either an act of purposeful deception or unintentional stupidity, with a small sprinkle of a possibility of the claim being the truth.

On November 24th, a press release was published on the DNA Diagnostics website titled “‘Bigfoot’ DNA sequenced in upcoming genetics study.” In it, Dr. Melba S. Ketchum explained that in a study that would soon be released, she would prove that male, non-human primates mated with early human females to create a line of Bigfoots, which her study genetically identifies as an “unknown hominid hybrid species in North America.”

Ketchum, who graduated with a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine from Texas A&M in 1978 and has been the director of DNA Diagnostics for the past 15 years, analyzed 109 DNA samples submitted by individuals throughout North America over the course of five years. Out of these samples, Ketchum said, DNA Diagnostics outsourced three of “the best samples that had the most DNA” to forensic labs (which she wouldn’t name) that she claims were able to complete whole genome sequences.

Lynne reports being regularly visited by Sasquatches at her home in rural Michigan

Ketchum says she never intended to prove Bigfoot exists, she just fell into it five years ago after DNA Diagnostics was featured on the SyFy show Destination Truth for its involvement in sequencing a Yeti sample. After the show aired, Ketchum said, the Bigfoot samples flooded in, including a sample from her current spokesperson, Robin Lynne, a character so bizarre she is her own conspiracy theory. Lynne reports being regularly visited by Sasquatches at her home in rural Michigan, and provided one of the three samples that was fully sequenced in the study, which she claims to have obtained from a partially-eaten blueberry bagel.

“This analysis would need to be done in an extremely careful way,” said Dan MacArthur, a genetics researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. “Analyzing the DNA of species believed to be closely related to humans is complicated by the danger of contaminating DNA from humans. This was a major problem for early analyses of Neandertal DNA.”

Picking hairs off a blueberry bagel left in a back yard doesn’t exactly fall under the purview of responsible DNA collection techniques.

“We washed the samples real well before extraction,” Ketchum said in her thick Texas drawl after I asked her how she could be sure the samples weren’t contaminated.

As the company has yet to publish the study and Ketchum refuses to discuss the details of how the samples were obtained, the methodology, or the results, the only socially responsible stance on this subject is skeptical neutrality.

“Until I see the data, I am withholding judgment,” wrote John Hawks, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.

Ketchum told me the study will be published in “a few weeks,” but wouldn’t say where and was decidedly not releasing it under embargo, a common thing to do when publication is confirmed. According to discussion in the SyFy forum for Destination Truth, the show that launched Dr. Ketchum’s quest, she has been saying her study would come out “in a few weeks” for over a year and Bigfoot enthusiast blogs like Bigfoot Evidence have reported that Ketchum’s paper has been rejected by a variety of US publications, which would explain her aversion to embargos. Additionally, some bloggers have reported that DNA Diagnostics has been closed down and the number disconnected, and the Better Business Bureau lists 25 complaints against the company.

“At this stage we have no detailed description of their analysis approach, no information about exactly how the source of the samples was confirmed, and no raw data to examine for evidence of artifacts,” MacArthur said. “Until those things are available, this story is pure noise. The raw sequence data is absolutely critical.”

“My best guess: this is contaminating DNA from a modern human, which is at least partly degraded and almost certainly mixed with DNA from other species,” MacArthur said. It would be easy for an inexperienced investigator to over-interpret a sample like that.”

Regardless of whether Ketchum’s story is a bizarre hoax or an innocent mistake, the nature of scientific inquiry does allow for the possibility of Bigfoot’s existence.

As many as 29% of Americans “think Bigfoot is ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ real.”

In 1951, British Himalayan mountaineer Eric Shipton publicized the first known photograph of an over-sized footprint which he claimed was made by a Yeti in the Himalayas. Seven years later, a bulldozer operator in Bluff Creek, California, came across some footprints and made plaster molds to support his case. Ever since, travelers who have ventured off the beaten paths into the North American wilderness have been submitting blurry photographs, videos containing flashes of hair peeking out from behind patches of brush, and eyewitness testimonials of encounters with Bigfoot.

These reports hardly qualify as evidence, but the sheer quantity of them is convincing enough for some — one poll suggests that as many as 29% of Americans “think Bigfoot is ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ real.”

“In the sense of there being a hairy bipedal species that is genetically distinct from Homo sapiens, sure,” said MacArthur. “Similar things co-existed with humans for long periods of our evolutionary history. I think it’s fairly unlikely that such a species could have completely evaded our notice until 2012, but I suppose it’s theoretically possible.”

Possible, yes. But a far cry from probable, as MacArthur and other good Bayesians responsibly assume the contrary, reserving mental space for a revision upon introduction of new evidence.

“The trouble with the scientific pursuit of Bigfoot, however, is that the logic breaks down immediately after looking at the basic phylogenetics,” Eric Michael Johnson, evolutionary anthropologist and author of The Primate Diaries said, referencing the study of how organisms are evolutionarily related.

Why is the idea of Bigfoot existing so powerful and persistent in our culture?

Evidence suggests that we had an ancestor known as Australopithecus, which evolved from ape-like beings similar to chimpanzees and bonobos approximately 4 million years ago. “But most species in this genus or in the later Homo were about four feet tall,” Johnson said, a profile very different from Bigfoot’s. He explained that while there was a larger ape-like creature that may have walked upright known as Gigantopithecus, this species emerged in southeast Asia about 9 million years ago and died out 100,000 years ago. “For Gigantopithecus to have been the ancestor of Bigfoot in North America it would require this large species to have migrated across the Bering Strait from Siberia into Alaska without leaving any fossil evidence along the way.”

Despite the lack of scientific validation of any of the findings submitted over the years, a cult of followers believe that a large, humanoid primate has been living among us for years while somehow evading capture, all the while managing to avoid leaving behind bones or other physical evidence of their existence. Even after watching the most convincing evidence deteriorate into hoaxes, some of which people have died orchestrating (one man dressed in a Yeti costume attempting to cross the highway was hit by a car), stories of Bigfoots, Yetis, and Sasquatches continue to permeate the American media — and the psyches of millions of people across the world. Why is the idea of Bigfoot existing so powerful and persistent in our culture?

Even famed primatologist Jane Goodall has been quoted as hoping Bigfoot is out there. “I’m not going to flat-out deny its existence,” Goodall said during an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post before a benefit dinner in La Jolla, Calif. “I’m fascinated and would actually love them to exist.”

“People want to believe Bigfoot exists because it represents a tangible link to our past.”

“People want to believe Bigfoot exists because it represents a tangible link to our past,” said Johnson. “It’s the secular side of the same longing that draws people towards believing in ghosts. If it could be proven, perhaps we could better understand why we’re here and what our ancestors were like, the same questions that motivate evolutionary anthropologists in the work they do studying human origins.”