Among the many particles that resulted from this crash were
bizarre objects called anti-hypertritons. Not only are these things antimatter,
but they're also what's called strange matter. Where normal atomic nuclei are
made of protons and neutrons (which are made of "up" quarks and
"down" quarks), strange nuclei also have so-called Lambda particles
that contain another flavor of quark called "strange" as well. These
Lambda particles orbit around the protons and neutrons.
If all that is a little much to straighten out, just think
of anti-hypertritons as several kinds of weird.
Though they normally don't exist on Earth, these particles
may be hiding in the universe in very hot, dense places like the centers of
some stars, and most likely were around when the universe was extremely young
and energetic, and all the matter was packed into a very small, sweltering
space.
"This is the first time they've ever been created in a laboratory
or a situation where they can be studied," said researcher Carl Gagliardi
of Texas A&M University. "We don't have anti-nuclei sitting around on
a shelf that we can use to put anti-strangeness into. Only a few anti-nuclei
have been observed so far."
These particles weren't around for too long, though – in
fact, they didn't last long enough to collide with normal matter and
annihilate. Instead they just decayed after a fraction of a billionth of a
second.
"That sounds like a really short time, but in fact on
the nuclear clock it's actually a long time," Gagliardi told SPACE.com.
"In that fraction of a billionth of a second that Lambda particle has already
gone around the nucleus as many times as the Earth has gone around the sun since
the solar system was created."
thinkahol * on 18 Jun 11Theodore Berger and his team at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Biomedical Engineering have developed a neural prosthesis for rats that is able to restore their ability to form long-term memories after they had been pharmacologically blocked. In a dramatic demonstration, Berger blocked the ability to rats to form long-term memories by using pharmacological agents to disrupt the neural circuitry that communicates between two subregions of the hippocampus, CA1 and CA3, which interact to create long-term memory, prior research has shown. The rats were unable to remember which lever to pull to gain a reward, or could only remember for 5-10 seconds, when previously they could remember for a long period of time. The researchers then developed an artificial hippocampal system that could duplicate the pattern of interaction between CA3-CA1 interactions. Long-term memory capability returned to the pharmacologically blocked rats when the team activated the electronic device programmed to duplicate the memory-encoding function. The researchers went on to show that if a prosthetic device and its associated electrodes were implanted in animals with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device could actually strengthen the memory being generated internally in the brain and enhance the memory capability of normal rats. "These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes," says the paper. Next steps, according to Berger and Deadwyler, will be attempts to duplicate the rat results in primates (monkeys), with the aim of eventually creating prostheses that might help human victims of Alzheimer's disease, stroke, or injury recover function. Ref.: "A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing
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