The Hunt For the Mysterious Dark Matter!

Shadow Universe 

Travis Rathbone

Dark matter makes up much of the cosmos, yet no one knows exactly what it is. Soon, physicists may finally solve one of science’s biggest mysteries.Dark matter makes up much of the cosmos, yet no one knows exactly what it is. Soon, physicists may finally solve one of science’s biggest mysteries.

“Turn here. Take the dirt road on the right. You’ve got to see this.” I park my rental car, and Rick Gaitskell directs me to a makeshift wooden observation deck overlooking the Trojan mine in Lead, South Dakota, just a mile down the road from his home. In the thickening twilight, we watch a phalanx of Caterpillar earth­movers scooping up and carting away chunks of a mountain, creating a large terraced pit. Nearby, a flat-crested ridge rises where the trucks have recently piled up rock from an earlier dig. Their piercing headlights mirror the glow of Venus, hovering just above the horizon. 

“It’s incredible,” Gaitskell says. “There’s no stopping it. They are literally moving mountains in search of gold.” I try to read his expression in the dim light. At first, I assume he is expressing camaraderie with the diggers at the Trojan site. Technically speaking, he is a physics professor at Brown University, but it isn’t much of a stretch to say that he is also a fellow prospector.

Gaitskell leads a team that has just switched on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, a hulking particle detector located almost a mile deep in the nearby Homestake Gold Mine. In effect, he is panning for dark matter, the invisible—and, for now, hypothetical—stuff that makes up five sixths of the mass of the cosmos. If he finds it, the Nobel committee will very likely come calling. Discovering just one dozen dark particles would be enough to throw all of modern physics for a loop. Considering the LUX experiment cost about $10 million to build, that puts the effective price of dark matter at, oh, about one million trillion trillion dollars per ounce. This is off-the-charts precious material.

“I’ve been looking for dark matter for 23, no, 24 years now,” he says. And he is not alone; the search for dark matter has grown into a small industry, albeit one that does not yet have a product to sell. “Every experiment has reported essentially negative results. No one even knows for sure if the damn stuff really exists. Those fellows,” Gaitskell says, nodding to the pit, “know exactly where the gold is.” I realize now he is not feeling empathy for the miners. He is feeling envy. 

Then his expression brightens: “This time, the outcome could be different. After about two weeks of operation, we expect LUX to surpass the sensitivity of the current world-leading experiment. After that, it should be sensitive to dark-matter particles in a way that no previous direct detection has been. Meanwhile, other experiments are closing in on dark matter on multiple fronts.” 

All around us, a second reality binds the universe and gives it order.Below where we’re standing, the trucks continue their restless maneuvers. Above, the stars of the Big Dipper shimmer into view. All around us, a second reality apparently binds the universe together and gives it order. No one in all of history has seen that invisible fabric. But in the next two years, scientists like Gaitskell may bring it into view.

Touching Dark Matter!

If you want to put your hands on something as subtle as dark matter, the first thing you need to do is get away from everything that may be blocking your path. That’s why my trip to the LUX experiment begins with an ear-popping elevator ride down the old Homestake Mine’s Yates Shaft. The surface world is awash with high-speed atomic fragments emitted by the sun, by supernovas exploding in deep space, even by distant black holes. With each second of my descent, that chaos fades. After a 10-minute drop, I reach 4,850 feet and walk out into a brightly lit maze of whitewashed tunnels. Until 2002, Homestake was still an active gold mine. Now, it has been repurposed as the Sanford Underground Research Facility. Only here is the surface world remote enough for LUX to do its job.

The history of dark-matter research has followed a similar trajectory, as scientists have stripped away the visible aspects of the universe to determine what else is out there. It began in the 1930s, when Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky measured the motions of galaxies and realized that even after he accounted for all the stars and gas, something seemed to be left over: massive clumps of unseen material yanking galaxies around at high speeds. He called it dunkle Materie.

Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector 

Photomultiplier tubes inside the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector in South Dakota can detect photons emitted when dark-matter particles collide with the nuclei of xenon atoms. 

Courtesy Lux Dark Matter

These days, the evidence for dark matter is everywhere. An invisible factor makes galaxies rotate faster than expected. It makes clusters of galaxies bend and distort passing starlight more than they should. It even seems to explain how those galaxies formed in the first place. Supercomputer simulations show that diffuse clouds of ordinary matter in the early universe did not have enough gravity to pull together into the orderly galaxies and galaxy clusters seen today. Run the same simulations with a dark component stirred in and everything comes together just right. 

What dark matter is, nobody knows. But physicists can tell you exactly what it is not: ordinary atoms of the variety that make up you, me, and everything else in the visible world. Some of the most persuasive proof comes from measurements of the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang. Right after that moment of birth, the whole universe was ringing like a bell, and just as a bell’s tone reflects its size and shape, so the pattern of cosmic ringing reveals exactly what material was present in the early universe. The humbling answer: 15 percent of the matter was and still is visible, 85 percent dark. (Even more bizarre, dark and visible matter together account for only one third of the total mass; the rest seems to be an unknown form of energy embedded in space itself.) 

“When I was in college and heard that 85 percent of the universe was missing, I knew that was what I wanted to study,” says Nicole Larsen, a Yale graduate student who works at the Sanford facility. Larsen and I are standing on a metal grate, eyeing the top nine feet of the two-story LUX detector. All the cool-looking stuff—the plumbing that keeps equipment clean and chilled, the electronics that collect and process data—is up here on level two. 

We walk downstairs, and I take in the slight anticlimax of the detector itself. It looks a lot like a giant water tank. It is, in fact, a giant water tank. It holds 70,000 ultrapure gallons that block natural radioactivity emitted by the surrounding rock. Suspended inside the tank, out of sight, is a 70-inch-tall, two-ton titanium freezer containing 800 pounds of liquid xenon cooled to –170°F. 

Considering the complexity of the underlying science, the concept behind LUX is strangely simple. “Whatever dark matter is, it certainly is in particle form,” Gaitskell says. According to the leading physics theory, dark matter is a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP. Sooner or later, a passing WIMP should randomly smack into an atom of ordinary matter, sending the atom flying. It would be like the invisible man going out for a jog and revealing himself by accidentally running into another jogger. When that happens to a xenon atom inside LUX, it emits a flash of light and gives off a slight electric charge. Detectors inside the tank look for that telltale pair of signals, while software weeds out the noise of everything else. 

Of the 10 other competing experiments, all rely on the same basic collision principle: Spot a signal, find a WIMP, identify dark matter, bag a Nobel. Will LUX be the one to win the prize?

Gaitskell groans. “The reality is that you’re mostly trying to identify mundane signals that only look like dark matter. You’re out there on the bleeding edge of technology, so often you have to learn how your detector operates as you go,” he says. That is a recipe for errors and controversial claims, of which there have been plenty over the past two decades. Many other dark-matter experiments have reported intriguing but vague sightings. One, called DAMA, based in Italy, claims to have 10 years’ worth of observations tracking dark-matter particles blowing past Earth. Competing teams have not found a source of error, but neither have they been able to confirm the result. 

“Everyone is after them, trying to drive a stake through the heart of DAMA,” says Juan Collar of the University of Chicago, who leads another dark-matter detector called COUPP, now firing up in the Vale Creighton Mine near Sudbury, Ontario. 

Gaitskell is eager for more cut-and-dried answers. “It doesn’t make any sense to me to build an experiment that isn’t going to be better than everything that’s come previously,” he says, “so we planned a detector that was substantially bigger and more sensitive.” The search will begin with a 60-day shakedown test this year, followed by a 300-day run. By then, LUX will be deep into unexplored territory, surpassing the sensitivity of previous searches by about a factor of 10. 

Creating the Dark Matter

Experiments designed to detect dark matter directly, such as LUX, are appealing because they are so intuitive: Either something goes bump inside the detector or it does not. But their simplicity comes with some serious limitations. If the dark particles are significantly lighter than expected, they may not show up in the detector. Even if they do, the detectors can tell you only a little about their properties.

If you really want to understand the physics of dark matter, you need to create it in the lab so you can study it and figure out what makes it tick. And if you want to start making an exotic new particle that no one has ever seen, you need to book a flight to Geneva, head down into another tunnel, and get to work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 

Particles ­­crashing together in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could produce dark matter. The particles would likely escape undetected, so physicists will look for signs of energy they carried away. 

Courtesy CERN

That’s what physicist Joe Lykken of Fermilab, a U.S. national laboratory for particle physics, has been doing for the past six years. It’s what thousands of his colleagues have been doing too. Despite all the breathless headlines about the Higgs boson, finding it was something of a secondary achievement for the LHC. Peter Higgs predicted the existence of that particle nearly half a century ago to fill in the gaps in the overarching framework of particle physics known as the Standard Model. Most researchers in the field considered the reality of the Higgs boson a foregone conclusion. (One MIT physicist privately confessed he was “depressed a little” that the Higgs fit the model so well.)

The real goal of the LHC is to grapple with some of the big questions that the Standard Model does not address. Atop that list: Why is gravity so weak compared with the other forces? Why is matter arbitrarily divided into two classes of particles—exemplified by photons and electrons—that behave according to different rules? And, yes, what is dark matter?

It turns out all these questions may be related through a theory called supersymmetry. “We’ve all agreed for the last 30 years that supersymmetry was the most obvious thing for nature to do,” Lykken says, because it restores balance to particle physics and points the way toward a long-sought “theory of everything.” Supersymmetry predicts that there is an as-yet undetected third family of particles that link the two we know. Conveniently, that family includes particles that fit the description of dark matter: massive, stable, and invisible. The process of proving that supersymmetry is correct should therefore have the happy byproduct of creating dark matter and nailing down its exact properties. That is where the LHC comes in.

At the LHC, physicists race beams of protons through a 17-mile-long underground ring, accelerate them to 99.9999991 percent the speed of light, and crash them together. At those speeds, the protons contain a staggering amount of energy: The beam contains the equivalent energy of a Toyota Corolla driving at nearly the speed of sound. After the collision, that energy has to go somewhere. What happens is that it spontaneously turns into matter, creating a spray of particles. (The equivalence of matter and energy—the soul of e=mc2—is everyday reality in the subatomic world.) Any kind of particle that can be created by that much energy could be present in the spray. 

The great hope of researchers like Lykken is that dark-matter particles are in the mix. Finding them is exceedingly difficult, because the particles themselves probably fly through the LHC’s instruments unseen. “Instead, you look for what we call ‘missing energy signatures,’ ” Lykken says. “That tells you there is one or more particles that we didn’t detect directly.” It is yet another form of chasing shadows.

So far, those experiments, which have been taking place ever since the LHC began smashing protons together in 2010, have turned up nothing. “I think it’s fair to say that people were a tad surprised that an instrument of the scale and audacity of the LHC didn’t see evidence of supersymmetry,” Gaitskell says. Some physicists started grumbling about abandoning the theory, but Lykken is not terribly concerned. Due to a number of technical mishaps—most notably a spill of more than six tons of liquid helium in 2008—the LHC has been operating at about half-power. Last February, engineers shut down the machine for a major upgrade. 

Particle physicists have simulated what a dark-matter event at the Large Hadron Collider might look like. Proton beams colliding within the circled region produce jets of ordinary particles. They may also create dark matter, which eludes direct detection but carries away energy (represented by the red arrow) that can be deduced later. 

Courtesy Matevz Tadel/University of California at San Diego

In 2015, the LHC will restart at full energy. In technical terms, it will go from 8 trillion electron volts to 14 trillion electron volts, but conceptually, it’s fair to say that physicists plan to turn up the volume to 11. “The LHC we just ran for two years was the backup plan after we had the accident,” Lykken says. “So it’s not fair to be disappointed that we didn’t find supersymmetry at the LHC, because the real LHC—the one we always advertised—hasn’t actually happened yet.” 

Dark-matter searches at the reborn LHC will take many forms. Pauline Gagnon, an Indiana University research scientist who works at CERN, the European physics consortium that built the collider, is exploring speculative “hidden valley” models, wherein an entire parallel world of dark particles would phase in and out of view in the LHC. Another place to look for dark matter, she notes, is in the particles created when a Higgs boson decays. That notion shows just how quickly the discovery process in particle physics is advancing. Last year, the Higgs was the cause célèbre, inspiring hyperbolic news stories and geek revelry. By 2015, the Higgs will be a familiar part of the landscape. It will be the dirt and sand that needs to be washed away by those panning for dark-matter gold.

Hunting The Dark Matter!

While most dark-matter sleuths hunker underground, Samuel Ting focuses his research 200 miles above the planet, at the International Space Station. Ting has no interest in waiting for dark particles to knock into an atom or to shoot out of a detector here on Earth; he wants to track them down in space, on their own turf, by picking up the visible trail they may leave behind. 

At first blush, that may sound like a contradiction. If something is dark, how can it be visible? But just as other particles may be able to create dark matter, dark matter may sometimes give rise to other particles. In particular, current theory suggests that if two WIMPs collide, they destroy each other, producing a burp of gamma rays and detectable particles in the process.  

Those particles would have some unusual characteristics. For one thing, they would consist equally of matter and antimatter, most likely electrons and their inverted twins, positrons. For another, those particles could carry any amount of energy up to a certain point but never more, a limit set by the amount of energy contained within the original dark-matter particle. Since mass and energy are equivalent, that maximum energy could reveal the dark particle’s mass. So the visible signal, if you use the term “visible” loosely, looks like this: an unexpected flux of positrons that obey a very strict energy limit. “You will know it has a dark-matter nature, because that distribution can come only from particle physics,” Ting says.

On Earth, positrons are destroyed the moment they touch ordinary matter, so the only way to pick up the dark-matter signal, Ting says, is to search for it in the vacuum of space. Not surprisingly, the idea of launching a giant particle detector above the atmosphere generated a lot of skepticism at first. “Nobody thought this could be done in space,” he says. Ting fought for 17 years, through a space shuttle catastrophe, numerous funding challenges, and several daunting technical setbacks, to make it happen. Finally, in 2011, astronauts installed Ting’s 18,500-pound, $2-billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the main truss of the International Space Station. 

This past spring, Ting released data from the first 25 billion particle detections. He strikes a tone of stoic optimism about the ambiguous results. The AMS does not see a telltale energy cutoff—what Ting calls “the cliff”—although there is maybe a little hint of the flattening before the cliff. Also encouraging: “Our data are coming from all directions,” Ting says, which is consistent with diffuse dark matter but not with a nearby astronomical object, like a collapsed star, that happens to be spitting out positrons. And he notes that he has only 8 percent of the data that he plans to collect between now and 2028, which will enable him to map cosmic matter and antimatter at energies similar to the collisions in the LHC. “Nobody has ever been there before,” Ting says.

ISS 

Dark-matter particles could destroy one another when they collide. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, mounted on the truss of the ISS, looks for antimatter produced by those impacts. 

Courtesy NASA

For particle searches, the AMS is by far the best game going—and probably will be for another couple of decades. But other researchers are following the dark-matter trail through space, seeking out the gamma rays that should also appear when two dark-matter particles collide. The approach requires less heroic measures and a lot less patience: NASA already has a space-based telescope, the Fermi observatory, capable of detecting such high-energy bursts of light.

In fact, the scientific literature is glutted with provocative radiation-signature claims. Over the past few years, several groups have declared that Fermi is picking up at least four different kinds of gamma-ray signals that don’t match any known object or process. That seems like tantalizing evidence of dark matter, but the reports disagree on many of the details. And many of the purported sightings are so faint that they are difficult to distinguish from instrumental effects or random cosmic noise. Even stranger, some of them should not be detectable at all according to conventional theories of dark matter.

Douglas Finkbeiner of Harvard University, who has spent much of the past year trying to make sense of one of these possible dark-matter signals, doesn’t hide his frustration. “It’s a hard game,” he says. “I would summarize by saying that things are confusing at the moment.” Yet in that confusion, he sees progress toward a deeper truth: The fact that the various experiments do not quite match up may indicate that there is more than one answer to the dark-matter puzzle. 

“I don’t see how dark matter can just be one little particle living off on its own, having nothing to do with anything else,” Finkbeiner says. “I think it’s going to open the floodgates to a whole new field of physics.”
 
Testing the Shadow Universe!

Finkbeiner works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a bastion of scientists who study the universe through observation. Walk 10 minutes down Garden Street, make your way into the red-brick Jefferson Lab, knock on the door of Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, and you enter the world of theory. This is the place where fragments of the shadow world may begin to come together into a single, coherent picture.

“This is just a big new idea, so it was kind of fun to work on,” Randall says. She’s referring to a novel theory, unveiled this past summer, called “double-disk dark matter.” The name, which sounds like a failed Ben & Jerry’s flavor, doesn’t begin to do it justice. What Randall and her collaborators have done is rip away many of the assumptions that astronomers and physicists have made about dark matter, primarily out of a desire for simplicity. 

Scientists have mostly assumed that dark matter is one particle—but, Randall asks, what if it is two or more mixed together? They have assumed that dark matter is largely inert, because it hardly interacts with visible matter—but what if dark matter can interact with itself in rich and complex ways? Randall describes the possibilities of the second kind of dark matter, and the hairs begin to stand up on the back of my neck. “There could be atoms, and there could be some sort of dark chemistry. There could be condensed objects, and then it’s possible they’d break into smaller ones,” she says. “It’s dark with respect to our light, but it might not be dark with respect to its own light.”

Randall has moved beyond metaphors. She is describing a literal shadow universe. 

In this new view, the predominant dark component is still diffuse and largely formless, accounting for the observed motions of galaxies and all the other evidence that established the existence of dark matter in the first place. The second interactive component is very different. It collapses just like visible matter and so would form a dark disk embedded within the visible disk of the Milky Way—hence double-disk dark matter. That disk could be governed by its own interactions and its own forces. In principle, dark physics could lead to dark stars, dark planets, even dark life. “There are some crazier ideas, and we’re working on them,” Randall says. “It really is a whole new world.”

Randall and her collaborators began by considering whether some dark matter could be denser than expected, as the Fermi gamma-ray detections seem to indicate, while remaining unnoticed by the direct-detection experiments. Their theory would explain both parts: The dark disk would pull together into a concentrated, flattened form, but it would rotate in tandem with Earth and the rest of the galaxy, like neighboring horses on a merry-go-round. Particles in the dark disk would barely be moving relative to us and so would cause nary a peep in an instrument like LUX. In a yet-unpublished elaboration of the double-disk theory, Randall and physicist Matthew McCullough of MIT even explain why some underground detectors pick up dark matter while others do not.

Dark Map 

The distribution of dark matter across the universe, measured by the Planck satellite, is projected onto an oval map of the full sky. Physicists identified dark-matter structures by the way their gravitational pull distorted the cosmic microwave background. Deep-blue areas are denser than light ones; gray areas indicate where light from our own galaxy was too bright for Planck to map more distant matter. 

Courtesy ESA and the Planck Collaboration

To a resolutely data-oriented guy like Rick Gaitskell, all this theorizing sounds a bit wifty. “If I may paraphrase TV’s Dr. House, there are times when you have two theories if one doesn’t explain it, but it’s something you should resist,” he says. Juan Collar, Gaitskell’s rival at COUPP, is open to the philosophically opposite view: “If the universe that we can perceive is so rich, why wouldn’t this dark side of things be as rich or more?” To a particle scientist like Lykken, a universe full of diverse dark particles sounds not only possible but reasonable. “There is more dark matter than the matter we know about,” he says. “So why shouldn’t dark matter be at least as complicated?”

Fortunately, Randall’s ideas are also testable, and here too the answer could arrive within the next couple of years—possibly even before LUX, the LHC, and the AMS have a chance to weigh in. If there is a dark disk alongside the visible disk of our galaxy, it should have a measurable effect on the motion of surrounding stars. A new European space telescope called Gaia, slated at press time to launch in November 2013, is about to start making those measurements.

Just as Fritz Zwicky first glimpsed the dark universe while following the motions of galaxies 80 years ago, so Gaia may unveil a whole shadow world sitting right in front of us. My mind drifts back to the scene above the Trojan mine. Gaitskell and I were looking down, imagining the gold below. All along, the proof of the shadow universe might have been floating right above us, just waiting for someone to notice it amid the stars! 

Source: PopSci

Resurrecting dinosaurs will remain a Jurassic park dream?

Contrary to earlier reports, DNA doesn't survive even decades in tree sap!

University of Wisconsin

On the same day that the latest installment of the Jurassic Park film series has been confirmed, a study published in PLOS One has detailed experiments that seem to demonstrate once and for all that dinosaurs will never again walk the Earth.

The 1993 film, based on a book by Michael Crichton, depicts a theme park island filled with dinosaurs, resurrected from ancient DNA extracted from fossilized mosquitoes trapped in amber. For a while, that science didn’t seem to be entirely fiction. In the early 1990s, several scientists announced they had extracted DNA from insects fossilized in amber as long as 130 million years ago. Insects from this time in Earth’s history, the early Cretaceous period, would have flown among dinosaurs (including giant, long-necked sauropods, among the largest creatures ever on land) as well as creatures such as flying pterosaurs, swimming plesiosaurs, feathered birds, and mammals.

This Lebanese amber was until recently the oldest in the world, older than the more common Dominican amber, which formed around 16 million years ago and the 49-million-year-old amber of the Baltic. But last year, tiny mites were found for the first time in amber dating from the Triassic period—230 million years ago.

While the premise of the film—that dinosaur DNA could be extracted from the guts of a preserved mosquito that had recently dined on one—seems reasonable, the fragile nature of DNA and the huge expanse of time that has passed have led many experts to doubt claims to have extracted any DNA that old—including DNA from the insect itself.

David Penney, a palaeontologist and expert in amber-preserved spiders and insects at the University of Manchester, carried out experiments to try to confirm once and for all whether DNA could be extracted from creatures fossilized in amber. With Terry Brown, an ancient-DNA expert also at the University of Manchester, they used the latest “next generation” DNA extraction and sampling techniques to avoid DNA contamination.

“We used Manchester’s specialized, dedicated laboratories that are only used for analyzing ancient DNA,” Penney said. “Any DNA traces will be tiny pieces of ancient, fragmented material, so it’s important to avoid contamination with modern DNA.” The laboratories are sterilized, the air filtered, and scientists wear full-body decontamination suits.

The specimens from which scientists claimed to have successfully extracted DNA were of stingless bees, and Penney used examples of the same species. One was about 10,600 years old, the second was preserved just after World War II—only about 60 years ago. Both samples were extracted from copal, a hardened form of tree sap that had encased the insects; it’s an intermediate stage that had not fully fossilized into amber. Chemicals were used to dissolve away the copal before samples were taken from the creature held inside.

The results were pretty conclusive: “In the oldest specimen we found no viable DNA,” Penney said. “In the newer sample, we found various bacterial and other DNA, but nothing that was certifiably from the bee.”

Brown explained that an older technique known as PCR was used in the 1990s experiments, and it may have caused problems: “The process, called polymerase chain reaction, will preferentially amplify any modern, undamaged DNA molecules that contaminate an extract of partially degraded ancient ones and give false positive results that might be mistaken for genuine, ancient DNA.”

The process of fossilization, whether in rock or amber, chemically changes the makeup of the organism it preserves. Over time, with heat and pressure, the remains are transformed, and they no longer contain the organic material that might harbor DNA.

If viable DNA cannot be extracted from a bee that is only as old as someone living today, there is no chance that it could be obtained from specimens hundreds of millions of years old. But that doesn’t mean the amber samples are useless.

“The preservation of these creatures in amber is remarkable, and they give us an insight into the past and can shed light on the possible future of the tropical forests of today,” Penney said.“I suppose it’s a bit of a shame that we can’t extract DNA from these creatures—I was even expecting to find some in the younger specimen—but it seems Jurassic Park must remain in the realms of fiction.”

This article was first published at The Conversation!

The Wow! Signal: Intercepted Alien Transmission?

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has seen astronomers scouring the sky for decades in hopes of receiving artificially generated radio signals sent by alien civilizations. But then, there’s a good chance we’ve already found just such a signal. And 1977 saw the most tantalizing glimpse ever.
Nicknamed the “Wow!” signal, this was a brief burst of radio waves detected by astronomer Jerry Ehman who was working on a SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope, Ohio. The signal was, in fact, so remarkable that Ehman circled it on the computer printout, writing “Wow!” in the margin — and unintentionally giving the received radio signal the name under which it would become famous.


SETI: No Alien Life Found, Yet!

Despite a lot of effort, no identification has been found for the signal’s source, and no repeat signal has ever been found. It’s a complete mystery. The only conclusion that can be drawn is if the signal truly did originate in deep space, then it was either an astrophysical phenomenon of which we’ve never seen before, or it truly was an intercepted alien signal.

To explain scientific observations, the normal method is to construct hypotheses and then test them. If your hypothesis is incorrect, it will fail to explain the observation. You can then continue this way, using different hypotheses, until you find something which can accurately describe what you’ve observed (if you ever watch Mythbusters, you may be familiar with how this works).

But with the Wow! signal, researchers ran into difficulty. After trying and failing to find any repeat of the signal, Ehman was skeptical of its origin, stating that “something suggests it was an Earth-sourced signal that simply got reflected off a piece of space debris.” But when he tried to investigate that explanation, he only found more problems.

Investigations found that it was scarcely possible the signal could have originated on Earth, and reflection off a piece of space junk was equally unlikely. The received signal was very specific, and these explanations required too many assumptions. A pattern of logical thinking known as Occam’s razor was pointing towards this signal having an astrophysical origin. But this provided no explanation for what it might be.

The Hydrogen Line

The curious Wow! signal is more or less a perfect match for what would be expected from a received extraterrestrial transmission. It’s been closely analyzed as a result, but to date no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation for where the signal came from.

For a start, the signal’s intensity was observed to rise and fall over a period of 72 seconds, consistent with the rotation of Earth, and a single source tracking across the sky, through the Big Ear telescope’s view. This gave the signal a characteristic signature, caused by objects seen in the sky. It would be nearly impossible for any Earth-bound object to match it.

It also stood out dramatically over the background noise found in deep space, being about 30 times louder than anything else around it. But by far the most interesting thing about this signal was its frequency.

This signal was very sharp, transmitting at only a single frequency. Natural radio sources don’t work like that. They spread across a range of frequencies, meaning that the same signal covers a broad band of transmission. The Wow! signal is not like this at all, showing only one very specific frequency at approximately 1420 MHz.

1420 MHz, also known as the hydrogen line, is a frequency internationally banned from use by terrestrial radio signals because of its use in radio astronomy. Astronomically, it’s usually emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms in interstellar space. It’s observed roughly evenly in all directions, and has been used before to help map out the galaxy. But in the SETI program, it has another use.

ANALYSIS: No Alien Signals Detected in Kepler SETI Search

Hydrogen is the most simple and abundant element in the universe, and any intelligent civilization would know of this frequency’s presence in space and probably be using it to make astronomical observations. As a result, SETI researchers consider it a logical frequency to check for any alien transmissions intended to be heard. It’s just as logical that any astronomers elsewhere in the galaxy might think the same way.

Is Anybody Out There?

The final question in the mystery is where exactly the signal came from. Because of the way in which the Big Ear was designed, the signal’s source can be narrowed down to one of two small regions in the sky. But that’s as precise as it gets.

This puts the source of the signal somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius. There are a handful of nearby stars, but it’s impossible to tell precisely where the signal originated. At least, not unless we ever hear a repeat signal. And given that no repeat signal has yet been found in any of the searches, it’s probably best not to hold your breath.

To date, most SETI searches have operated by sweeping the sky, observing any spot for only a few minutes at a time. While this allows a lot of coverage, it also means that the likelihood of eavesdropping on any signals that happen to be pointing in our direction is minimal. The other approach would be more like the way the Kepler mission worked, by staring at one particular patch of sky and waiting. Of course, while we now believe that exo-planets are common across the galaxy, we have much less idea when it comes to alien transmissions — for all we know, we may waste years looking in the wrong direction.Unfortunately, there’s no way for us to know what exactly caused the Wow! signal. As much as some of us would love to use it as proof of extraterrestrial life, that would be a leap of faith, and unscientific at best. Astronomer Robert Gray describes it as “…a tug on the cosmic fishing line. It doesn’t prove that you have a fish on the line, but it does suggest that you keep your line in the water at that spot.”

Logically, the conclusion that must be drawn is that the Wow! signal very likely originated in deep space, but if it did then it was either a completely unknown astronomical phenomenon, or an intercepted alien broadcast — but with nothing else to go on, there’s no way to prove or disprove either of these ideas.

For now, the Wow! signal remains as nothing more than a vague but enthralling hint that there may be more things lurking out there in this galaxy of ours than we currently know of!

Use Universal Gesture Control From Any Room In Your House!

Wave your hand to change the music. The music in the other room!

Imagine the Kinect. Now imagine you can use gestures like you'd use with the Kinect to control anything--appliances, lights, gadgets, whatever. Now imagine you can do all of that from a different room entirely.
WiSee (pronounced "we see") is a project from a team of University of Washington computer scientists to do just that, using the Wi-Fi signals your house already has. The Kinect works by bouncing infrared light off of what it sees and measuring the reflection, but WiSee uses something quite a bit more powerful: Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi signals are bouncing around your house all the time, and aren't impeded (well, not much, anyway) by walls or line-of-sight issues. So theoretically, you could use Wi-Fi signals much the same way the Kinect uses infrared. The movement of your arm only causes a very small change in the Wi-Fi signal, but the team created an algorithm that looks for the tiny signals, so you can make smaller gestures, like raising and lowering your hand to change volume.
First, the user performs one big gesture to get the system's attention. That functions as both a security measure (so your neighbors can't control your oven, for example) and as a call to action, the same way you have to say "Xbox!" when you want to use the Kinect. The system requires multiple antennae, but only a single receiver, and more than one user can use the system at once.
Despite being a small project based on existing technology (only the latest to do that kind of thing), it seems remarkably accurate; out of 900 gestures performed during a test, including pushing, pulling, twisting, and even complex motions like bowling, WiSee managed to correctly identify 94 percent of them. The team is still developing the tech, but as they've worked with illustrious companies like Microsoft in the past, don't be surprised if WiSee shows up on the market!

What Will It Take To Find Life Elsewhere In The Universe?

The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes won't find life beyond the solar system. 

With funding and support, here's what might!

Earth rise 

NASA

The sky was hazy and overcast above Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the morning of July 8, 2011. A light breeze from offshore cooled off an estimated 750,000 onlookers braving the sticky summer heat to say goodbye to NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis. It was the final flight of a thirty-year-old spaceflight program—and the uncertain opening of an era in which humankind may find living worlds among the stars.

Five Billion Years of Solitude 

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, by Lee Billings, is available on Amazon.

Current/Penguin Group LLC

As the final countdown commenced, Chris Ferguson, the spacecraft’s commander, contemplated the program’s end with the mission’s launch director, Mike Leinbach. “The shuttle is always going to be a reflection of what a great nation can do when it dares to be bold and commits to follow-through,” Ferguson radioed from his seat astride the eighteen-story-tall, 4.5-million-pound shuttle stack. “We’re not ending the journey today, Mike, we’re completing a chapter in a journey that will never end.”Ferguson, like many before him, was echoing the core sentiment of the reclusive philosopher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of modern rocket science. While Orville and Wilbur Wright pioneered powered flight at Kitty Hawk, Tsiolkovsky wrote passionately from a remote log cabin in Russia about space exploration and a human destiny amid the stars. He theorized about launching multistage rockets into orbit, living and working in outer space, and someday escaping the solar system. He also famously devised what is now known as the “rocket equation,” a mathematical formula that encapsulates all the key variables affecting a rocket’s maneuvers. “The bulk of mankind will probably never perish, but will just keep moving from sun to sun as each becomes extinguished," Tsiolkovsky wrote in an early paper, laying out the visionary impetus behind his work. “There is thus no end to the life, evolution, and improvement of mankind. Man will progress forever. And if this be so, he must surely achieve immortality.” This vision of an unbounded future beyond Earth, while implied but rarely explicitly acknowledged, remains the purest and most noble purpose behind any human space program.
Moments after Ferguson channeled Tsiolkovsky at Cape Canaveral, the shuttle’s engines and rocket boosters surged and crackled to life. Atlantis pushed her crew skyward on a quivering cataract of golden flame and electric-blue shock diamonds. The grand spectacle, however, left behind a space program fallen into quiet decay: NASA lacked a ready replacement for the shuttle fleet and was scaling back programs across the entire agency.
The space shuttle, conceived in the technological ferment of the Apollo missions, was supposed to be a revolutionary, reusable spacecraft that would fly once a week. It would make space travel cheap, frequent, and routine. Instead, President Richard Nixon balked at the projected expense, and the chimeric vehicles that finally emerged were elegant, versatile, and irreparably flawed. In nearly every aspect—cost, frequency, reusability, and safety—the shuttle program was a ruinous white elephant that failed to deliver on its most crucial promises.
The lone exception was arguably the Hubble Space Telescope, a school bus–size robotic observatory that space shuttle Discover delivered into low Earth orbit in 1990. After an audacious repair job in space, Hubble began paying off. Its view was sharp enough to discern changing weather on Mars, explosive comet impacts on Jupiter, and Saturn’s ghostly polar aurorae. Gazing out to nearby star-forming regions, the telescope spied young stars cocooned in swirling disks of gas and dust that were building planets. Hubble conclusively showed that the Andromeda galaxy would collide and merge with our Milky Way in about four billion years. And, inspecting surrounding galaxies, it found that nearly all of them had supermassive black holes at their centers.

Hubble ultra deep field 

NASA

In the fruitful years that followed Hubble’s launch and repair, NASA announced its successor: the Next Generation Space Telescope, later renamed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Its mission would be to fully unveil the universe’s very first galaxies, the objects that manifested only as tiny red blobs in Hubble’s deepest images.
But just as NASA threw its weight behind JWST, the field of exoplanetology began its meteoric rise. Astronomers could for the first time rationally discuss the possibility of finding other Earth-like planets, to considerable public interest and acclaim. Over interstellar distances, the planet hunters calculated, our world would appear slightly fainter than a typical galaxy in a Hubble deep field image. In theory, that would be something JWST could detect, and indeed the telescope would excel at imaging hot young gas-giant planets far from their stars. But in practice, habitable planets would lie far too near their much brighter host stars.
To image a rocky planet around a star is like photographing an unlit match adjacent to a detonating hydrogen bomb.Our own Earth, for instance, is some ten billion times fainter than our Sun in visible light—for every photon reflected off our planet out to space, our star blasts out ten billion more. In infrared, the contrast ratio becomes more favorable—at those wavelengths, the Sun is only some ten million times brighter than our world. To image a rocky planet around a star is to capture a dim fleck of dust practically hugging the cusp of a thermonuclear fireball, like photographing an unlit match adjacent to a detonating hydrogen bomb. You’d have to block out all those thermonuclear photons in their millions or billions so that even a single photon reflected from a planet could be seen. Only a space-based observatory could avoid the blurring interference of Earth’s atmosphere and deliver the light of any potentially habitable planets orbiting many other stars.
At an early 1996 meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Antonio, Texas, NASA’s then-administrator, Dan Goldin, took the stage. He presented an alluring vision of what the agency would do immediately after JWST: reshape NASA’s entire science program around astrobiology, with new life-finding space telescopes as the glittering centerpiece. “About ten years from now,” he explained, the agency could be ready to launch a “Planet Finder,” an observatory that would locate potentially habitable worlds and take their low-resolution pictures. It would look for atmospheric biosignatures in the spectrum of each small clump of planetary pixels. This was one of the earliest public mentions of what would become NASA’s “Terrestrial Planet Finder” (TPF) mission concept. If a TPF found promising worlds around nearby stars, Goldin told his rapt audience, then “perhaps in twenty-five years” even more ambitious telescopes could be built that could image those planets “with a resolution to see ocean, clouds, continents and mountain ranges.” Sometime in the twenty-first century, he later said, those revealed as living worlds could become prime targets for robotic interstellar probes.

James Webb Space Telescope mirrors 

NASA

Unfortunately, JWST’s development proved more difficult than planned. To image the earliest stars and galaxies, the telescope would need a much larger primary mirror than Hubble’s, one optimized for the infrared wavelengths (where molecular clouds, giant planets, and the earliest galaxies shine the brightest). The mirror would need to neatly fold up inside a rocket fairing. In space, it’d require cryogenic cooling so that its own internal heat would not wash out the fragile light of cosmic dawn. Finally, it could not operate in low Earth orbit, because the light-bulb-like glow of our planet at infrared wavelengths would contaminate the delicate observations.
Various international partners signed on to construct instruments or to provide a launch vehicle, but NASA would bear the brunt of the cost, which early estimates pegged at approximately $1.5 billion. Launch was tentatively scheduled for circa 2010. As the project’s true complexity and scale became clear, cost estimates were revised ever upward, but little in the way of boosted funding appeared. Instead, money for JWST would have to come from NASA’s other space-science programs. In the end, more than $2 billion would be required for technology development alone. JWST’s schedule began to slip. The project’s total cost shifted more and more major expenditures into the future. By 2012, JWST’s construction, testing, launch, and first five years of operation were estimated to cost nearly $9 billion, with a launch date no earlier than 2018.
National and global economic calamities exacerbated JWST’s birthing pains. NASA’s budget plateaued and did not keep up with monetary inflation. A trillion-dollar surplus built up in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton became a multitrillion-dollar deficit in the 2000s under the tax cuts and runaway spending of his successor, President George W. Bush. Then, after the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, Bush delivered a bold new mandate but without funding or deep Congressional support: return to the Moon and to deliver humans to Mars.
To pay for the ultimately doomed program, called Constellation, NASA in 2006 chose to siphon billions of dollars from its science budget. JWST’s development fell into disarray and dashed hopes for a prompt development and launch of a TPF, which was officially “deferred indefinitely.” President Barack Obama in 2010 canceled Bush’s plans, but the damage was done. To adequately fund JWST, the agency scaled back, delayed, or canceled nearly all its other major next-generation astrophysics and planetary-science missions; if the observatory was to succeed, it could only do so at the great expense of eliminating most of NASA’s space-science portfolio. For want of money and strong institutional support, a TPF seemed almost as far distant and out of reach as the stars themselves.

Terrestrial Planet Finder 

NASA

The thought weighed heavy on John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and NASA astronaut who had flown on five space shuttle missions, three of which to service Hubble. The press hailed Grunsfeld as a hero, and called him “Dr. Hubble.” He mulled over the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the ISS and the shuttles, and the comparative sliver of funding required to sustain the golden age of space telescopes. He wondered how NASA’s brawny human exploration program might once again forge a powerful partnership with the agency’s purely scientific side. So, during 2003 and 2004, he served as NASA’s chief scientist and helped develop science applications for Bush’s Constellation program. Big rockets, it turns out, are just as useful for launching extremely large telescopes as they are for hurling astronauts toward the Moon. Such a rocket might make launching JWST and conceivably larger TPF-style observatories easier and cheaper. The planning backfired, however, when Constellation cast its hungry shadow over NASA’s science budget. In early 2010, Grunsfeld left NASA to serve as deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland—the pulsing nexus of operations for Hubble and, someday, for JWST. He worked closely with the institute’s director, the astronomer Matt Mountain, for nearly two years to lay the groundwork for a future TPF-style telescope. Their preferred in-house design was aptly named ATLAST, the Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope, and was intended to deliver images of potentially habitable exoplanets. Dr. Hubble had become Dr. TPF, Dr. ATLAST.   
But in late 2011, Grunsfeld’s phone rang. NASA wanted Grunsfeld at the helm of the largest pure science budget in the world, albeit one struggling to meet all its myriad obligations. He accepted, and upon returning tamped down his past vocal advocacy for life-finding space telescopes in favor of emphasizing balance across all of NASA’s science programs. There was no announcement of bold new funding to search for alien Earths, but Grunsfeld’s closest friends and former confidants could not forget his former fervor. After nearly a year’s worth of fruitless exchanges with NASA in attempt to speak with Grunsfeld for this book, I took solace in what he had freely told me during an earlier interview.
“Hubble and Webb will probably leave us hanging on the question of whether there is life elsewhere in the universe,” he said. “What we need in the next generation of great space telescopes—and what we can achieve—is the capability to observe the atmospheres and surface features of every single habitable planet around the nearest thousand stars. We could finally find out we’re not alone. We could finally find other habitable worlds, each of which, in principle, could be visited by humans. That’s the big picture, and I want to be able to convince the public and the Congress and the future administrations that it’s worth investing in this next step.”
Clearly, Grunsfeld had read his Tsiolkovsky.

Source: PopSci

Government Technology to Read Your Thoughts and Implant New Ones!

HAVE you ever thought about something you never shared with anyone, and have been horror-struck at the mere thought of someone coming to know about your little secret? If you have, then you probably have all the more reason to be paranoid now thanks to new and improved security systems being developed around the world to deal with terrorism that inadvertently end up impinging on one's privacy.

Some of the countries involved in such programmes include USA, UK, Spain, Germany and France. Recently, the National Security Agency (NSA) of the US has developed a very efficient method of controlling the human brain. This technology is called Remote Neural Monitoring (RNM) and is expected to revolutionise crime detection and investigation.

What is it?

RNM works remotely to control the brain in order to read and detect any criminal thought taking place inside the mind of a possible perpetrator. Research studies have shown thatthe human brain thinks at a rate of about 5000 bits per second and does not have the capacity to compete with supercomputers performing via satellites, implants and biotelemetry. The human brain has a distinctive set of bioelectric resonance system. For the RNM system, supercomputers are being used and, thus, with its help, supercomputers can send messages through an implanted person's nervous system in order to influence their performance in a desired way.

RNM has been developed after about 50 years of neuro-electromagnetic involuntary human experimentations. According to many scientists, within a few years it is expected that DNA microchips will be implanted in the human brain which would make it inherently controllable. With RNM, it will be possible to read and control a person's emotional thought processes along with the subconscious and dreams. At present, around the world, supercomputers are monitoring millions of people simultaneously with the speed of 20 billion bits per second especially in countries like USA, Japan, Israel and many European countries.RNM has a set of certain programs functioning at different levels, like the signals intelligence system which uses electromagnetic frequencies (EMF), to stimulate the brain for RNM and the electronic brain link (EBL). The EMF Brain Stimulation system has been designed as radiation intelligence which means receiving information from inadvertently originated electromagnetic waves in the environment. However, it is not related to radioactivity or nuclear detonation. The recording machines in the signals intelligence system have electronic equipment that investigate electrical activity in humans from a distance. This computer-generated brain mapping can constantly monitor all electrical activities in the brain. The recording aid system decodes individual brain maps for security purposes.

What does it do?

For purposes of electronic evaluation, electrical activity in the speech centre of the brain can be translated in to the subject's verbal thoughts. RNM can send encoded signals to the auditory cortex of the brain directly bypassing the ear. This encoding helps in detecting audio communication. It can also perform electrical mapping of the brain's activity from the visual centre of the brain, which it does by bypassing the eyes and optic nerves, thus projecting images from the subject's brain onto a video monitor. With this visual and audio memory, both can be visualised and analysed. This system can, remotely and non-invasively, detect information by digitally decoding the evoked potentials in 30-50Hz, 5 millwatt electromagnetic emissions from the brain. The nerves produce a shifting electrical pattern with a shifting magnetic flux which then puts on a constant amount of electromagnetic waves. There are spikes and patterns which are called evoked potentials in the electromagnetic emission from the brain. The interesting part about this is that the entire exercise is carried out without any physical contact with the subject.

The EMF emissions from the brain can be decoded into current thoughts, images and sounds in the subject's brain. It sends complicated codes and electromagnetic pulse signals to activate evoked potentials inside the brain, thus generating sounds and visual images in the neural circuits. With its speech, auditory and visual communication systems, RNM allows for a complete audio-visual brain to brain link or a brain-to-computer link.

Of course, the mechanism needs to decode the resonance frequency of each specific site to modulate the insertion of information in that specific location of the brain. RNM can also detect hearing via electromagnetic microwaves, and it also features the transmission of specific commands into the subconscious, producing visual disturbances, visual hallucinations and injection of words and numbers in to the brain through electromagnetic radiation waves. Also, it manipulates emotions and thoughts and reads thoughts remotely, causes pain to any nerve of the body, allows for remote manipulation of behaviour, controls sleep patterns through which control over communication is made easy. This can be used for crime investigation and security management.

Concerns

With all the given benefits of RNM for tracking the illicit and treacherous activities, there are many concerns and risks being pointed out by human rights activists and other scientists. The agencies of human rights around the world have criticised RNM as a violation of basic human rights because it violates privacy and the dignity of thoughts and activities of life. Several countries have protested against it and refer to it as an attack on their human and civil rights. The scientists protesting against the use of RNM believe thatpeople who have been implanted involuntarily become biological robots and guinea pigs for RNM activities in the guise of security. This is an important biological concern related to microchip implantation, which is a hidden technology using microwave radiations for the control of the mind.

Scientists believe that like leukemia and the cancerous risks posed by mobile phones which also emit microwaves, RNM can also pose similar threats to a subject's overall health as the heating effect of tissues with the speed of light is a known effect of high powered microwave and electromagnetic pulse weapons.

Thus, RNM remains a controversial technology which is being used in many countries for security maintenance and surveillance!

Teleportation,a success!

Furusawa group at the University of Tokyo has succeeded in demonstrating complete quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits by a hybrid technique for the first time worldwide. In 1997, quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits was achieved by a research team at Innsbruck University in Austria. However, such quantum teleportation couldn't be used for information processing, because measurement was required after transport, and the transport efficiency was low. So, quantum teleportation was still a long way from practical use in quantum communication and quantum computing. The demonstration of quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits by Furusawa group shows that transport efficiency can be over 100 times higher than before. Also, because no measurement is needed after transport, this result constitutes a major advance toward quantum information processing technology.

"In 1997, quantum bit teleportation was successfully achieved, but as I said just now, it was only achieved in a probabilistic sense. In 1998, we used a slightly different method to succeed at unconditional, complete teleportation. But at that time, the state sent wasn't a quantum bit, but something different. Now, we've used our experimental technology, which was successful in 1998, to achieve teleportation with quantum bits. The title of our paper is "Hybrid Technique," and developing that technique is where we've been successful."

The hybrid technique was developed by combining technology for transporting light waves with a broad frequency range, and technology for reducing the frequency range of photonic quantum bits. This has made it possible to incorporate photonic quantum bit information into light waves without disruption by noise. This research result has been published in Nature, and is attracting attention worldwide, as a step toward quantum information processing technology.

"I think we can definitely say that quantum computers have come closer to reality. Teleportation can be thought of as a quantum gate where input and output are the same. So, it's known that, if we improve this a little, the input and output could be produced in different forms. If changing the form of input and output like that is considered as a program, you have a programmable quantum gate. So, I think a quantum computer could be achieved by combining lots of those."

Looking ahead, Furusawa group aims to increase the transport efficiency and make the device smaller by using photonic chips. In this way, the researchers plan to achieve further advances toward quantum computing.

Source: 

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