Scientists are surprised to discover that lightning emits powerful bursts of antimatter into space.

Very small amounts have been produced by powerful particle accelerators including CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, but can be captured for only fractions of a second. That’s why researchers are so astonished to see antimatter being produced by such a common event as lightning.

In retrospect, “we can say, ‘Why didn’t we realize that was happening?’ ” said physicist Joseph R. Dwyer of the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla., a coauthor of a paper about the findings that is scheduled to appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Even so, “it’s surprising that we are seeing so much…. It illustrates the amazing things that thunderstorms can do.”

Some indirect evidence in the past suggested that antimatter might be emitted by lightning, added electrical engineer Steven Cummer of Duke University, who studies lightning and the radio emissions from it. “But this is the first time it has been absolutely, unambiguously detected,” he said.

Fermi, launched in 2008, detects gamma rays, the highest-energy form of electromagnetic waves — a spectrum that includes light rays. When a positron produced by a thunderstorm strikes an electron on the satellite, it releases gamma rays with a characteristic energy of 511,000 electron-volts. Such an event linked to a thunderstorm is known as a terrestrial gamma-ray flash. Fermi has witnessed 130 such events since its launch.

Most such events occurred when the satellite was directly over a storm. But one event, on Dec. 14, 2009, occurred when Fermi was over Egypt and the nearest active storm was in Zambia, about 2,800 miles to the south and well below the satellite’s horizon.

~http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/11/science/la-sci-thunderstorms-antimatter-20110112

This week brought the 44th anniversary of the classic science fiction TV series “Star Trek.” On Sept. 8, 1966, the first episode of Captain Kirk’s adventures aired, and over the decades some of the imagined future technologies in the “Star Trek” universe have actually come to life in some way, shape or form.

Now, it appears we may be a step closer to seeing another “Star Trek” tech come to life: the tractor beam. But don’t expect to capture a Romulan Warbird with it any time soon.

Building a tractor beam in the lab may sound a little far-fetched, but physicists at the Australian National University have announced that they’ve built a device capable of transporting small glass particles — a hundred times the size of a bacterium — one and a half meters across a laboratory desk without touching them. This is a huge advance considering existing “optical tweezers” can only push particles the size of a bacterium few millimeters in liquid.

How is this achieved?

In the “Star Trek” universe, spaceships use a ” graviton beam emitter” to create a graviton interference pattern that can be manipulated to grab onto other sub-warp-speed space objects (I’ll get on to warp speed later.) Alas, gravitons are hypothetical quantum particles in our universe, and the Australian researchers certainly can’t use them in their lab experiment.

Instead, they’ve built a “hollow laser” that can trap small objects inside and manipulate them.

This 21st-century technology creates a very thin tube of laser light with a dark core. When the glass particles are placed inside the cool core, they are kept there by the laser-heated air. Should the particles drift in any direction, they are pushed back to the center by the hot cushioning air molecules.

NASA said last week that the world was not ending — at least anytime soon. Last year, CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, said the same thing, which I guess is good news for those of us who are habitually jittery. How often do you have a pair of such blue-ribbon scientific establishments assuring us that everything is fine?

On the other hand, it is kind of depressing if you were looking forward to taking a vacation from mortgage payments to finance one last blowout.

CERN’s pronouncements were intended to allay concerns that a black hole would be spit out of its new Large Hadron Collider and eat the Earth.

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Months after its skipper was rescued at sea by the Navy, the U.S.-flagged container ship Maersk Alabama repelled an attack by suspected pirates today off the northeast coast of Somalia.

Back in April, the Maersk Alabama was boarded by pirates, who took ship captain Richard Phillips hostage. Phillips was freed after Navy snipers shot and killed three of the pirates who were holding him prisoner in a lifeboat.

This time, the pirates didn’t get that far. According to a statement released by the U.S. 5th Fleet in Manama, Bahrain, when a pirate skiff approached the ship this morning, the security team on board responded with evasive maneuvers, and blasted them with Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) and small-arms fire. The pirates then broke off the attack.

April’s Maersk Alabama incident forced a rethink of counter-piracy measures, including embarking armed security teams. Shipping companies and their insurers had in the past been reluctant to have armed security teams on board, but as recent incidents have shown, sometimes the combination of the LRAD, firehoses and evasive maneuvers is not enough.

Take, for instance, the case of the cruise ship MSC Melody: An Israeli security team used guns and firehoses to repel the attackers.

And while the LRAD was famously used to repel pirates in a 2005 attack on a cruise ship, a team of three security operatives was unable to outgun pirates with a sonic blaster in a separate incident. They were forced to jump ship.

Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, the commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, praised the operators of the Maersk Alabama for their willingness to take on more-robust defenses. “This is a great example of how merchant mariners can take proactive action to prevent being attacked, and why we recommend that ships follow industry best practices if they’re in high-risk areas.”

The Maersk Alabama is now underway to its initial destination of Mombasa, Kenya.

UPDATE: The chief mate of the Maersk Alabama is now using the incident to advocate for putting armed mercenaries on all U.S. ships. “We cannot play roulette with the lives of the U.S. Merchant Marines, choosing to arm some and not others with various levels of expertise,” Captain Shane Murphy says in a statement. “It is imperative that we utilize private armed security consisting of American, former military special operatives that can consistently make the necessary shot to mitigate the RPG on each and every U.S. flagged vessel traversing the High Threat Waters. Anything less is not enough.”

Photo: Wikimedia

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Credit Due: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/11/maersk-alabama-repels-pirates-with-sonic-blaster-bullets/#more-19613