The Peculiar Dispatch #007

Nearly a mile underground in a former gold mine in South Dakota sits the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment: a giant detector containing around 10 tonnes of liquid xenon, built to catch interactions with something we have never directly identified, Dark matter.

Scientists have now reported a single mysterious particle interaction that is proving extremely difficult to explain using known background sources. The event produced the sort of nuclear recoil and faint flash of light that researchers might expect if a hypothetical dark-matter particle called a WIMP collided with a xenon atom. But there's an important caveat.

The signal currently sits at around 2.6 sigma, well below the five-sigma standard normally demanded before particle physicists declare a discovery. So this is absolutely not "dark matter discovered." But it may be one of the most intriguing hints yet.

And dark matter isn't some obscure substance we're looking for in tiny quantities. It is thought to account for roughly 85% of the matter in the universe. Which means almost everything we can actually see. You, Earth, stars, planets and galaxies. This represents only a fraction of what's out there.

Researchers exploring the shoreline of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe travelled through an environment inhabited by crocodiles and hippos searching for fossils. Then they found something science had never described before.

A new dinosaur!

It has been named Musango matusadonaensis and belongs to the sauropodomorph lineage — the broader evolutionary group that eventually produced Earth's gigantic long-necked sauropods. There's something wonderfully ridiculous about the whole situation:

Scientists dodging modern African megafauna to uncover an African megafauna that disappeared around 200 million years ago.

In 1948, legendary physicist Richard Feynman proposed an extraordinary way of understanding quantum mechanics.

Imagine a particle travelling from A to B.

Common sense says it takes a path. Quantum mechanics says things get considerably weirder.

Feynman's path integral formulation treats the outcome as arising from contributions associated with every conceivable path between the two points — including routes that look completely absurd from a classical perspective. Physicists have used the mathematics successfully for nearly 80 years.

But now researchers in China have reportedly performed a direct experimental test of the idea using a carefully controlled quantum system. It's another wonderful example of the universe refusing to behave according to human intuition.

You've probably heard the standard story. Around 4.5 billion years ago, the young Earth was smashed by a Mars-sized planetary body often called Theia. Material blasted into orbit. That debris eventually accumulated into...

the Moon.

But new simulations suggest the process may have happened differently. Researchers created more geologically realistic computer models that included something previous simulations often neglected: the physical strength of the colliding planetary material.

Under some conditions, instead of simply producing a debris disk that slowly assembled into the Moon, the collision can produce an intact Moon-like body directly. That potentially changes how scientists interpret one of the biggest events in Earth's history.

A) Russia
B) United States
C) France
D) China

C — France.

You'd naturally expect Russia.

But when France's overseas territories are included, the country spans 12 standard time zones and sometimes effectively 13 local offsets depending on seasonal arrangements.

Metropolitan France is relatively small, but French territories are scattered across the Caribbean, South America, Indian Ocean and Pacific.

So France effectively stretches around the planet.

A) About 10%
B) About 25%
C) About 50%
D) Most of it

D — Most of it.

The vast system of mid-ocean ridges running across the seabed is volcanically active.

NOAA estimates that the majority of Earth's volcanic activity occurs underwater.

So while eruptions in Iceland, Hawaii or Italy make the news, an enormous amount of Earth's volcanic activity happens where practically nobody can see it, at the bottom of the ocean.

A) Blue whale
B) Giant sequoia
C) A fungus
D) Great Barrier Reef

C — A fungus.

In Oregon's Malheur National Forest lives an enormous Armillaria ostoyae fungus.

Most of it isn't a giant mushroom sticking above the ground. It's an interconnected network of fungal material spreading underground. Genetic testing has indicated that enormous areas of the fungus belong to one individual organism, covering roughly 9 square kilometres.

Its estimated age runs into thousands of years. So one of the largest organisms on Earth has been quietly sitting beneath a forest...

and most people walking above it would never know it was there.

Thank you.