BallLightning
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Tangled 'particle' helps scientists model rare ball lightning
Ball lightning (those bright spheres of light during some thunderstorms) remains mysterious despite decades of study. But how are you supposed to get a better look at it in a lab? Researchers might have discovered how through a happy accident: create a tangled atomic mess. They created a Shankar skyrmion, a quasiparticle whose artificial magnetic field, it turns out, mimics the electrical and magnetic fields of ball lightning. The team applied a magnetic field to a Bose-Einstein condensate (a state of matter for boson gas cooled to near absolute zero), in this case made of rubidium, to get the atoms to spin along the surface of a ball yet twist inside that ball.
Alt-week 20.10.12: our oldest primate ancestor, the birth of the moon and a planet with four stars
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Most mornings, we wake up with little to no idea what happened the day before, let alone last week. Fortunately, they don't let us run important scientific research projects. Or maybe they do, and we just forgot? This week (and most others as it goes) we definitely leave it to the pros, as we get some insightful glimpses at some important origins. Ball Lightning, the moon and even us humans are the benefactors of those tireless scientists, who work hard to explain where it all comes from. There's also a planet with four stars that sees the first few paragraphs of its origin story excitedly written out. One thing we never forget, however, is that this is alt-week.
