News

In “Antimatter surplus is not dark matter’s smoking gun” (New Scientist, September 6, 2011), Stuart Clark explains, Antimatter enthusiasts will love it; dark matter hunters not so much. NASA’s FERMI satellite has confirmed a previous hint that there is more antimatter than expected coming from space. The bad news is that the result almost certainly rules out dark matter as the source. Bad, dude. Antimatter is matter with the charges reversed – positrons (+), instead of electrons (-), for example. It is present today in small numbers. Dark matter is a theoretical concept: Matter that emits no light signal, hence the name. It may very well exist, but so far no such particle has been captured. Dark-matter theorists had been Read More ›

In “Antibiotic resistance found in ancient bacteria” (CBC News, Aug 31, 2011), Emily Chung reports, The same genes that make disease-causing bacteria resistant to today’s antibiotics have been found in soil bacteria that have remained frozen since woolly mammoths roamed the Earth. “We’ve shown for the first time that drug resistance is a really old phenomenon and it’s part of the natural ecology of the planet,” said Gerard Wright, a biochemist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. Five years ago, Wright had discovered harmless soil bacteria, Actinobacteria, that showed resistance to antibiotics (not, presumably, directed at them). He then sought bacteria that had never been exposed to human efforts against microbes. Geologist Duane Forese suggested taking soil samples from under Read More ›