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Science

Physicists Detect Mysterious X Particles in ‘Primordial Soup’ For The First Time

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A mysterious particle thought to have existed briefly just after the Big Bang has now been detected for the first time in the ‘primordial soup’.

Specifically, in a medium called the quark-gluon plasma, generated in the Large Hadron Collider by colliding lead ions. There, amid the trillions of particles produced by these collisions, physicists managed to tease out 100 of the exotic motes known as X particles.

 

“This is just the start of the story,” says physicist Yen-Jie Lee of MIT, and a member of the international CMS Collaboration headquartered at CERN in Switzerland.

“We’ve shown we can find a signal. In the next few years we want to use the quark-gluon plasma to probe the X particle’s internal structure, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe should produce.”

Mere moments after the Big Bang, the very early Universe wasn’t made of the same stuff we see floating around today. Instead, for a few millionths of a second, it was filled with plasma superheated to trillions of degrees, consisting of elementary particles called quarks and gluons. That’s the quark-gluon plasma.

In less time than it takes to blink, the plasma cooled and the particles came together to form the protons and neutrons of which normal matter is constructed today. But in that very brief twitch of time, the particles in the quark-gluon plasma collided, stuck together, and came apart again in different configurations.

One of those configurations is a particle so mysterious, we don’t even know how it’s put together. This is the X particle, and it’s only been seen very rarely and briefly in particle colliders – too briefly to be probed.

 

Theoretically, however, X particles could appear in the very small flashes of quark-gluon plasma that physicists have been creating in particle accelerators for some years now. And this might afford a better opportunity to understand them.

During the Large Hadron Collider’s 2018 run, positively charged atoms of lead were slammed together at high speeds. Each of these roughly 13 billion collisions produced a shower of tens of thousands of particles. That’s a dauntingly colossal amount of data to sift through.

“Theoretically speaking, there are so many quarks and gluons in the plasma that the production of X particles should be enhanced,” Lee says. “But people thought it would be too difficult to search for them because there are so many other particles produced in this quark soup.”

Although X particles are very short-lived, when they decay, they produce a shower of lower-mass particles. To streamline the data analysis process, the team developed an algorithm to recognize the patterns characteristic of X particle decay. Then they fed the 2018 LHC data into their software.

The algorithm identified a signal at a specific mass that indicated the presence of around 100 X particles in the data. This is an excellent start.

 

“It’s almost unthinkable that we can tease out these 100 particles from this huge dataset,” Lee said.

At this point, the data are insufficient to learn more about the X-particle’s structure, but the discovery could bring us closer. Now that we know how to find the X-particle’s signature, teasing it out in future data sets should be a lot easier. In turn, the more data we have available, the easier it will be to make sense of them.

Protons and neutrons are each made up of three quarks. Physicists believe that X particles may be made of four – either an exotic, tightly bound particle known as a tetraquark, or a new kind of loosely bound particle made from two mesons, each of which contain two quarks. If it’s the former, because it’s more tightly bound, it will decay more slowly than the latter.

“Currently our data is consistent with both because we don’t have enough statistics yet. In the next few years we’ll take much more data so we can separate these two scenarios,” Lee says.

“That will broaden our view of the kinds of particles that were produced abundantly in the early Universe.”

The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.

 

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Science

Shattered ‘alphabet soup’ iceberg flushed a lot of fresh water into the ocean

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A rogue iceberg that drifted dangerously close to an Antarctic penguin population in 2020 and 2021 released billions of tons of fresh water into the ocean during its breakup.

A new study, based on satellite data, tracks the aftermath of the once-mighty iceberg A-68a, which held the title of world’s largest iceberg for more than three years before shattering into a dozen pieces. (NASA’s Earth Observatory once dubbed the various mini-bergs “alphabet soup.”)

For a while, there were worries the iceberg might threaten a penguin-filled island called South Georgia, located about 940 miles (1,500 kilometers) northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Happily, that never came to pass, but the new research shows that the iceberg flooded the region with fresh water, potentially affecting the local ecosystem and providing yet another example of the effects of global warming on the oceans.

Related: Watch this giant iceberg break off from Antarctica

The research consulted data gathered by missions including Sentinel-1 (operated by European Space Agency, or ESA), Sentinel-3 (ESA), CryoSat-2 (ESA) and ICESat-2 (NASA), as well as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument that flies aboard two NASA satellites, Aqua and Terra.

The satellite data shows that during the iceberg’s three-month melting period in late 2020 and early 2021, the former A-68a flushed into the ocean about 162 billion tons (152 billion metric tonnes) of fresh water — equivalent to 61 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to a press release from United Kingdom study participant University of Leeds.

“The berg had melted enough as it drifted to avoid damaging the sea floor around South Georgia by running aground,” the university stated. “However, a side effect of the melting was the release of a colossal 152 billion tonnes of fresh water in close proximity to the island — a disturbance that could have a profound impact on the island’s marine habitat.”

Fresh meltwater and nutrients tend to flow from melting icebergs. The freshwater flooding alters ocean circulation and the ocean ecosystem nearby the glacier fragment, the university noted.

“The next thing we want to learn is whether it had a positive or negative impact on the ecosystem around South Georgia,” Leeds lead author and Ph.D. candidate Anne Braakmann-Folgmann said in the same statement. 

She noted the iceberg moved across a common ocean “highway” known as the Drake Passage, so the fate of A68-A may help understand how icebergs in that zone influence the ocean in general.

A study based on the research was published in the forthcoming March 1 issue of Remote Sensing of Environment.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 



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World

Happy cats or soup? How one couple’s felines continue to control of their Vitamix

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There’s just one problem.

They’ve been unable to open the box for nearly a month because their three cats are taking turns sitting on it.

Unusually drawn to the box, the three felines rotate 24/7, so the box is never without a cat sitting on top. In order to not disturb the cats, who rule the house according to Jessica Gerson-Neeves, they’ve decided to let the standoff play out until someone gives in.

Plus, it’s making them laugh, along with a lot of people on the internet.

Developing a strange fascination with their ongoing battle, CNN contacted Jessica to check on the current status of the couple’s three cats at in their home on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

While we spoke, their cat Max was sitting on the box.

So why don’t they just move him and open the box?

“Because everything really is bad, bad, bad and this is something that is ridiculous and funny and very, very low stakes. Like, there’s nothing at all about this that is either bad or sad,” Jessica laughs.

She explains it all started the day the Vitamix was dropped at their doorstep. She moved it to the kitchen and placed it on the floor for what she thought would be a few seconds. That’s when Max jumped on. He looked cute so she snapped a picture.

“This definitely started out just as like, of course, we think our cats are cute because everyone who loves cats thinks their own cats are the cutest cats. So we take pictures every time they do anything,” Jessica says. “They really are taking turns and you know, everyone goes, but what about meal times? Come on meal times! Max is not — and never really has been — food motivated. The other two are very food motivated, but Max just doesn’t super care. They’ll eat, but if there’s something he’s more interested in, he will happily tend to that and not worry about food.”

When Max isn’t on the box, one of his 13-year-old brothers, George: Destroyer of Worlds (“sentient potato”) and Lando Calrissian (“the questionably sentient dust bunny,”) is.

The box doesn’t have an unusual feel or smell to it, from what Jessica can tell, it’s just a box.

“I swear I have a nose like a bloodhound and it doesn’t smell like anything to me. So if they’re smelling something, it’s gotta be real subtle,” Jessica says.

She started posting updates in an online cat group and the response was “fast and overwhelming.”

There has not been one moment the box has been free while the couple has been home, either alone or together. They even send picture proof to each other showing who’s on the box. They’ve tiptoed out of the bedroom in the middle of the night to find yes, a cat on the box, guarding it.

“We are spending so much of our days laughing at this point at the response at the comments and on each update,” Jessica says. “Because every day we post an update and I pick from the funniest or cutest pictures.”

At this point the cats are (kind of) into it, as much as cats can be.

“They obviously know that we are interested because we’re taking a lot of pictures and we’re interacting with them when they’re on the box,” Jessica says.

Jessica wrote a letter to Vitamix, thinking that they would get a kick out of what was going on too.

“I figured their social media manager would see it and pass it on to other people at the company,” she explains. “Everyone would get a kick out of it.”

The company sent the couple three empty “decoy” boxes.

They tried one, but the cats quickly realized they prefer the sturdier box with the blender inside.

“This valiant attempt was unsuccessful,” Jessica laughs. “Without internal support structure, we kind of had to figure out a way to put stuff in there. So the cats wouldn’t fall through.”

To all the people who tell them to just take the cats off the box, Jessica gets it.

“Have we tried super hard? No, because obviously we could pick up the cats and set them on the floor. Sure. They don’t weigh a lot.”

Instead, the two are trying to make share their amusement.

“This is what our household is like. Our lives involve a great deal of laughter and love. We keep ourselves going with a good sense of humor and trying to be patient. And as, as my wife says, to find joy where it lives,” Jessica says.

And so the $450 blender remains in the box. No soup. No smoothies.

“We’re absolutely inundated with people saying, oh my God, no, no, no. Don’t, don’t rush this to a conclusion. Please take your time,” Jessica says, adding “there will come a point when we will want to use our new blender.”

What will they make first?

“My wife is very excited about smoothies. I’m a big fan of soup. I’m really looking forward to some good hot soup. But I think at this point, when we finally get access to the blender, we’re both looking forward to a nice margarita, which we’ve earned.”

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World

How a Stunning Lagoon in Spain Turned Into ‘Green Soup’

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LA MANGA, Spain — The Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon on the coast of southeastern Spain, was long renowned for its natural beauty, drawing tourists and retirees to its pristine warm shallows and the area’s gentle Mediterranean climate.

But over the past few years, the idyllic lagoon has come under threat. Tons of dead fish have washed ashore as the once-crystalline waters became choked with algae.

Scientists are divided over whether climate change — causing excessive heat that reduces oxygen levels in water — is contributing to the problem. But they agree that nitrate-filled runoffs from fertilizers from nearby farms have heavily damaged the waters where oysters and sea-horses used to thrive. But farmers in the area have balked at shouldering the blame.

Hugo Morán, a senior official in the central government’s environment ministry, estimated that 80 percent of the water contamination resulted from the unchecked growth of agriculture. He also put some of the blame on local politicians, accusing them of long downplaying the contamination and proposing unviable remedies, such as channeling plenty of the lagoon’s waters into the Mediterranean Sea.

This would only create another victim, he said.

“To heal, you first have to recognize the illness,” he said. “But what we have heard, instead, are sporadic claims by the regional government of Murcia that the Mar Menor is doing better than ever.”

Similar problems have cropped up in other parts of the world recently. Pollution, including from nitrogen-based contaminants, has been blamed for accelerating the secretion of a slimy substance called mucilage that has clogged the Sea of Marmara in Turkey. And waste produced by a nearby electricity plan and oil refinery has damaged the giant Berre lagoon in southern France.

The area around the Mar Menor, with its fertile fields and temperate year-round climate, has proved irresistible to large-scale farms, which often use ecologically damaging nitrate fertilizers. Adding to the problems, there has been extensive tourism development on the narrow, 13-mile sandbank known as La Manga, or the Sleeve, that separates the Mar Menor from the Mediterranean.

Whoever is to blame, María Victoria Sánchez-Bravo Solla, a retired schoolteacher, has had enough.

When five tons of dead fish washed up in August near her house on the lagoon, she decided that she was ready to move. She called it “an environmental disaster that should put our politicians and all those who deny responsibility for allowing this to happen to shame.”

Such mass die-offs of fish have happened a few times over the past five years, and the stench of decomposing algae, which has turned the lagoon’s waters darker and murkier, is a further sign of the ecological crisis.

Local restaurants no longer serve Mar Menor seafood and commercial fishing crews now trawl in the nearby Mediterranean instead. Few residents would even consider taking a dip in the lagoon anymore.

As the problems have intensified, so has the blame game.

The conservative administration of the Murcia region says the Spanish central government in Madrid, currently a left-wing coalition, should do more to help. Madrid says the responsibility lies at the local level.

Miriam Pérez, who is responsible for the Mar Menor in the regional government, said she believes political rivalries are keeping the central government from doing more.

“I unfortunately do think that political colors matter,” she said.

She said the central government had done little to support her right-wing administration’s cleanup efforts — including removing about 7,000 metric tonnes of biomass — mostly decomposing seaweed — even after the region issued a decree in 2019 to protect the lagoon.

In August, when another wave of dead fish washed up, scientists noted that the water temperature had climbed significantly. But in September, the Spanish Institute of Oceanography published a report that rejected the idea that excessive summer heat helped kill the fish.

Scientists instead place much of the blame with farming. In 1979, a canal was opened to carry water from the Tagus — the longest river in the Iberian Peninsula — to southeastern Spain. The canal led to irrigation, which transformed Murcia into one of Europe’s farming powerhouses, producing lettuce, broccoli, artichokes, melons and more for export across the continent.

Agriculture represents 8.5 percent of the region’s gross domestic product and provides about 47,000 jobs, according to a study published last year by the University of Alcalá, near Madrid.

But the farmers around the Mar Menor have deflected the blame, saying that the contamination comes from water seeping into the lagoon from an aquifer in which toxic substances have accumulated over decades.

Vicente Carrión, president of the local branch of COAG, an agriculture union, said that farmers were now strictly using only the amount of fertilizers needed for plants to grow.

“We are getting blamed for what went on 40 years ago” when less scrutiny was placed on agricultural practices and the authorities’ emphasis was on taking advantage of the demand from across Europe, he said.

Adolfo García, director of Camposeven, an agriculture exporter that harvests about 1,500 acres of land in the region, said that most farmers had already switched to sustainable production methods. Laggards should get government incentives to invest in green technology rather than “stones thrown by people who have no knowledge of our modern irrigation systems,” he added.

“Even if we planted nothing in this area for the next 50 years, the aquifer would remain very polluted,” he said.

But Julia Martínez, who grew up in the region and is now a biologist and technical director at Fundación Nueva Cultura del Agua, an institute that specializes in water sustainability, said that the arguments about the aquifer were a red herring. She said at least 75 percent of the lagoon’s water contamination came from runoffs.

The impact of tourism — another giant contributor to the local economy — is another problem. The Mar Menor’s hotels and restaurants are concentrated along the sandy bar of La Manga, where dozens of apartment blocks were also built, many as holiday homes. Almost every inch of the strip is developed.

Mr. Morán, the environment secretary, acknowledged that the Mar Menor had suffered from an “open bar” approach in terms of awarding building permits. But he mostly blamed fertilizer runoff from farms.

The lagoon was proof that “one of the major problems of Europe is the contamination of its waters by nitrates,” he said.

Pedro Luengo Michel, a biologist who works for Ecologistas en Acción, a Spanish environmental organization, said the farming and tourist industries have broad influence, particularly at the local level where the conservative Popular Party has governed since 1995.

“We are confronting a very powerful farming lobby which our politicians depend on to stay in power,” Mr. Luengo Michel said.

Mr. Morán said that his central government planned to use 300 million euros, or about $350 million, from the European Union’s pandemic recovery fund to protect the Mar Menor’s natural habitat and waters. The plan includes replanting vegetation close to the shores, which can stop contaminated water flowing in from neighboring fields.

For some scientists, monitoring the deterioration of the lagoon has felt like a personal tragedy.

“I remember finding it stunning as a child that I could see the sand at the bottom without even noticing the water because the Mar Menor was so transparent,” said Ms. Martínez, the biologist.

“Now, we sadly have a green soup and I certainly have long stopped swimming in it.”

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Science

Mass Extinction Events Can Turn Freshwater Into Toxic Soup, And It’s Already Happening

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Apart from the global catastrophe that killed off most of the dinosaurs, some experts think almost all the mass extinctions in Earth’s history were followed by a proliferation of microbes in rivers and lakes.

 

After the Permian extinction event 252 million years ago – the largest mass extinction event in Earth’s history – there appears to have been a burst in bacterial and algal blooms, lasting for hundreds of thousands of years.

According to the geologic record in Australia, the damaging impacts of climate change and climate-driven deforestation during the Permian extinction event most likely caused a toxic soup to sprout in the Sydney Basin, one of the oldest known freshwater ecosystems in the world.

That’s disconcerting, the authors say, as human activity is leading to a similar mass extinction event today.

“We’re seeing more and more toxic algae blooms in lakes and in shallow marine environments that’s related to increases in temperature and changes in plant communities which are leading to increases in nutrient contributions to freshwater environments,” says geologist Tracy Frank from the University of Connecticut

“So, a lot of parallels to today. The volcanism was a source of CO2 in the past, but we know that the rate of CO2 input that was seen back then was similar to the rate of CO2 increases we’re seeing today because of anthropogenic effects.”

 

Algae and bacteria are normal parts of a healthy freshwater environment, but sometimes they can grow out of control and deplete the water of oxygen, creating ‘dead zones’. 

This tends to happen with global warming, deforestation, and the rush of soil nutrients into waterways, which can feed microbes. All three of these factors are in play today, which is why we are probably seeing increases in toxic blooms already.

Considering what’s happened in the past, that’s a disturbing sign.

According to soil, fossil, and geochemical data from the Sydney Basin, researchers think the spread of microbes in the wake of the Permian extinction “was both a symptom of continental ecosystem collapse, and a cause of its delayed recovery.”

Volcanic eruptions in the Permian first triggered an accelerated and sustained rise in greenhouse gas emissions. This caused higher global temperatures and sudden deforestation due to wildfires or drought.

Once the trees were gone, it wasn’t long before the structure of the soil began to erode, and its nutrients slipped into freshwater ecosystems.

For more than three million years, Earth’s forests struggled to recover. The Sydney Basin was instead littered with lowland ecosystems that “were regularly inundated by stagnant, fresh/brackish waterbodies hosting thriving algal and bacterial populations”, the authors write.

 

In turn, these persistent dead zones prevented the reestablishment of important carbon sinks, like peatlands, and slowed down climate and ecosystem recovery.

Other deep-time records around the world have also found microbial blooms are common after warming-driven extinction events. The exception seems to be the very large asteroid event that caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

This major episode caused vast amounts of dust and sulfate aerosols to rise into the atmosphere, but compared to volcanic activity, the meteorite only caused a modest increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature, not a sustained one. As such, freshwater microbes only seemed to undergo a short-lived burst after the extinction event.

Unfortunately, that’s very different from what occurred during the Permian extinction and what is happening today.

For instance, the researchers note that the “optimal temperature growth range” of these harmful algae in freshwater environments is 20-32 °C (68-89.6 °F). That range matches the estimated continental summer surface air temperatures for the region during the early Triassic. That range is what’s projected for mid-latitude continental summer surface air temperatures in 2100.

Scientists are noticing other similarities, including an increase in forest fires and the subsequent destabilization of soils.

“The other big parallel is that the increase in temperature at the end of the Permian coincided with massive increases in forest fires,” says geologist Chris Fielding, also from the University of Connecticut.

“One of the things that destroyed whole ecosystems was fire, and we’re seeing that right now in places like California. One wonders what the longer-term consequences of events like that as they are becoming more and more widespread.”

The good news is that this time many of the changes are in our control. The bad news is that whatever happens next is our own fault.

“The end-Permian mass extinction event took four million years to recover from,” Fielding says. “That’s sobering.”

The study was published in Nature Communications. 

 

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Entertainment

Campbell’s soup cans get first redesign in 50 years

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Eagled-eyed customers will notice that the famed red and white design remains, but the Campbell’s logo is receiving a “modernized logo scripture,” which includes eliminating the shadow and a slightly changed font that is based on founder Joseph Campbell’s original signature.

Other changes include the word “soup” printed in a new font, along with a slanted “O” as a nod to the brand’s original label from 1898. Also, the “C” from the redesigned Campbell’s signature is used in the fleur de lis next to the word soup. Varieties receiving the redesigned labels include tomato, cream of chicken, cream of mushroom and chicken noodle. The redesigned cans are currently rolling out to store shelves.

The changes “still evokes the same sense of comfort, goodness and Americana” as its predecessor, Campbell Soup Company (CPB) said in a statement. The soup maker said it’s hoping to “reimagine” the brand for a new generation of customers that are increasingly cooking at home because of the pandemic.
To celebrate the launch, Campbell’s is selling its first-ever non-fungible token (NFT) of the new label beginning Tuesday at 5:30 pm ET with proceeds benefiting Feeding America. The brand tapped street-style artist and illustrator Sophia Chang to create an NFT that is a “tribute to Campbell’s continued evolution shown through the iconic designs it has produced throughout the years.”
Sales of Campbell’s soups exploded last year as people sheltered in place because of the pandemic. However, this year hasn’t been as profitable because of rising supply chain costs and inflation. The company announced in June it’s increasing the prices it charges retailers and other customers by an average of roughly 5% later this year.

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