This week on phys.org, we published news about muons, gigantic stellar waves, a Homo-erectus-thwarting mini ice age, and a new whale guy.
Particle wobbles: Macro-scale physicists have achieved nanoscale precision measurements of the muon anomalous magnetic moment as part of a decades-long agenda of shaking the standard model and shouting “Are you complete yet?” The unforthcoming standard model has stubbornly refused to explain subatomic phenomena like dark matter, and scientists have been searching at increasingly smaller scales for particles within the standard model that could account for them. One such mystery: If you run muons in circles around a powerful magnet, they wobble, decaying in unexpected directions. This is the anomalous magnetic moment. It’s possible that undiscovered particles nudge muons under these conditions. Does this latest project, the Muon g-2 experiment, resolve the question? Haha, no. But it does confirm earlier findings at a much higher level of precision, which is a pretty big deal, at least according to physicists, to whom “big” is, like, the size of an electron.
New whale guy: If you relate emotionally to organisms that crawled from the ocean to the land, said “lol, no,” and waddled back into the sea forever, a new whale guy just dropped. An international team of scientists discovered an extinct whale that inhabited the Tethys Ocean, an ancient sea that once covered modern Egypt. They’ve named it after notable 18th-dynasty pharaoh Tutankhamen. Tutcetus ratanesis is a basilosaurid, an extinct family that lived during the middle to early late Eocene. Tutcetus is the smallest species of basilosaurid ever discovered, expanding the size range of the family and illuminating early whale evolution.
Apocalypse Not: In 2022, researchers led by Dr. Kenneth Tankersley published a sensational paper in Scientific Reports claiming that the Indigenous Hopewell culture, which thrived around what is now Cincinnati, was destroyed by an exploding comet 1,500 years ago. OK! One and a half years later, archaeologists at Ball State University say that not only is the word “destroyed” doing some heavy lifting, the words “by,” “an,” “exploding” and “comet” are similarly load-bearing structural elements. In their response paper, also published in Scientific Reports, researchers including Dr. Kevin C. Nolan basically challenge all of the individual words in the original paper.
“There is no evidence for catastrophically burned habitations at any of the 11 Hopewell sites studied by Tankersley’s team,” Dr. Nolan said. “The burned surfaces identified by the University of Cincinnati researchers are either localized episodes of burning for ceremonial purposes, such as cremating the honored dead, or are not even burned surfaces at all.” Fair enough! The response paper also carefully details “numerous instances of possibly intentional data manipulations.”
2023-08-13 12:00:04
Link from phys.org