Best of Last Week – Finding missing matter, strange music from the moon and how junk food primes the brain
It was another good week for physics as a new fast radio burst discovery found 'missing matter' in the universe—the international team of space scientists used a combination of optical and radio telescopes to home in on the burst first heard in April of last year.
Also another international team of researchers found that graphene slides smoothly across gold—suggesting that the versatile substance also offers the potential to be used for coating machine components because it showed nearly zero energy loss. And a team at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel announced that they had achieved perfect efficiency for a water-splitting half-reaction, possibly paving the way for a cheaper way to obtain hydrogen. Also a team working on the DZero international collaboration at Fermilab announced that they had discovered a new subatomic particle—a tetraquark they have called X(5568).
In other news, a varied group of researchers in the U.S. found a California gas well blowout caused the nation's largest methane release—known as the Aliso Canyon disaster, the researchers found emissions from the natural gas well blowout released enough methane to fill a balloon the size of the Rose Bowl, every day for over a hundred days, sickening local residents and making headlines around the world. Also, NASA released strange 'music' heard by 1969 astronauts—recordings made during the Apollo 10 mission of strange and still unexplained whistling noises as their craft flew around the dark side of the moon. And a team with the Scripps Research Institute announced that they had uncovered a potential target for treating autoimmune disease—a molecule that appears to be the cause of diseases such as Lupus. Also, a team of researchers at the University of Washington announced that they had achieved Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power—a passive WiFi system that not only uses less power, but works with current WiFi hardware. And a team at the University of Texas unveiled a proven one-step process to convert CO2 and water directly into liquid hydrocarbon fuel.
And finally, if you have ever felt that your desire for fast food might be tied to your ancestors need to survive, you might be interested in a study conducted by researchers in Canada—they described how junk food primes the brain's food-seeking behavior—causing us to want to eat more of it.
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