Gizmorama - February 25, 2015

Good Morning,

This March the Large Hadron Collider will resume scientific work after two years of improvements. Hopefully, this will get scientists closer to confirming the existence of "dark matter" particles.

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- New York's attorney general wants microbead ban --*
ALBANY, N.Y. (UPI) - If you've used a mass market facial scrub in the shower, you've likely rolled microbeads across your skin. You've probably seen them sparkling in a freshly squeezed glob of toothpaste.

If you've ever been swimming in Lake Erie, it's not likely you noticed any microbeads. They're tiny. But they're there, collecting in the millions, and New York's attorney general isn't happy about it.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is currently recruiting state legislators to draft a bill banning the small plastic balls. Research has shown they accumulate in bodies of fresh water. The small size of the exfoliants allow them to bypass water treatment plants, and environmentalists contend they can end up in the guts of fish -- and potentially in the stomachs of fish-eating humans, too.

This isn't the first time Schneiderman has tried to outlaw microbeads. He launched a similar effort in 2014, but his proposed bill never made it to the floor of the Republican-controlled Senate for a vote after clearing the all-Democrat House with 131 yeas and zero nays. Schneiderman reached out to lawmakers this week, encouraging them to again take up the cause.

"This common-sense legislation will stop the flow of plastic pollution from ill-designed beauty products into our vital waters, preserving our natural heritage for future generations," Schneiderman said in a statement.

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has expressed support for Schneiderman's efforts; she is also pursuing a federal ban on the tiny synthetic balls.

"When plastic microbeads leach into our water, they attract toxins that harm fish and birds and get passed on to humans," said Gillibrand. "We need to protect New Yorkers, our water, and our wildlife from dangerous pollutants and damage caused by microbeads."

So far only Illinois has successfully banned the beads, but some major cosmetics producers have pledged to voluntarily phaseout the plastic balls, including Johnson & Johnson, L'Oréal and Procter & Gamble.


*-- New and improved Large Hadron Collider ready to do science again --*
SAN JOSE, Calif. (UPI) - Researchers hope the Large Hadron Collider, set to resume scientific work in March after two years of improvements, can help them confirm the existence of "dark matter" particles.

Dark matter makes up 27 percent of the universe. Dark energy -- the all-encompassing term used to describe the strange properties exhibited by the emptiness of space -- makes up 68 percent of the universe. In other words, more than 95 percent of the universe remains largely a mystery.

But next month, particle- and astrophysicists will go to work on shining a bit of light on these dark mysteries using the bigger, more powerful LHC.

"What we know about dark matter is that it exists, and then very little after that," Michael Williams, a physicist and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Discovery News.

Scientists know dark energy is responsible for the acceleration of the universe's expansion, and that dark matter absorbs light but does not reflect or emit it, but no one has any real idea how or why such is the case.

"It would be nice if we could start to understand what dark matter is and how it affects the galaxy and the evolution of the universe," Williams added.

He said, however, that he and his colleagues would be satisfied with small insights into the particles that make up dark matter.

In 2012, scientists used the LHC to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, or Higgs particle, an elementary particle that had previously only existed in theoretical equations. Follow up research revealed other similar particles, the smallest and faintest of subatomic building blocks.

Some of these so-called ghost particles, researchers claim, have hinted at what could be the relatives of dark matter.

The Large Hadron Collider, located at the CERN research laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, works by smashing particles together at high speeds. During these high-energy collisions, strange new particles are often produced. These particle fragments exist for only a nanosecond or less before they decay into more recognizable forms.

With the LHC now twice as powerful, scientists hope even more energy-packed collisions will reveal new subatomic particles -- like dark matter.

"If we find something that looks like it could be dark matter at the LHC, we would try to measure as much as we can about it ... and hopefully get hints of how to detect it directly in other experiments," Jay Hauser, a physicist at UCLA, told Live Science.

Researchers shared their aspirations for LHC's upcoming work, and the ongoing search of dark matter, at this week's American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Jose.

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