August 10, 2023: Exotic particles point to a new physics, men stayed home in the Stone Age and the world's oldest moss. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Muons are unstable subatomic particles that are 200 times the mass of electrons and live only a fleeting 2.2 microseconds. New results from the Muon g-2 experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., suggest that the muon's "magnetic moment"--that is, how sensitive it is to magnetic forces–slightly deviates from what is predicted by the standard model of physics.
Why this matters: How sensitive these particles are to a magnetic field might reveal "new physics": if muons don't behave quite as expected, there could be unknown particles nudging the muons around while they traverse strong magnetic fields. The trouble is, theorists have been (and are still) struggling to calculate, with precision, what the standard model's prediction actually is—which means no one really knows what to make of this result.
What the experts say: "The g−2 measurement is a fantastic achievement.... It's very difficult stuff with very high precision," says Patrick Koppenburg, an experimental physicist at the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics. | | | A team of researchers reconstructed two family trees spanning several generations during the Stone Age. They used genetic, archaeological and social anthropological methods to analyze the remains of more than 100 dead individuals buried between 4850 and 4500 B.C.E. at the Gurgy "Les Noisats" cemetery in central France. One of their most surprising discoveries: men in these Neolithic families lived and married near their home, while women came from communities elsewhere; the researchers suggest women left their family and place of birth to reside with their reproductive partner elsewhere.
What this means: Some women were distantly related to one another. Presumably they could have come from the same outside community. This suggests partnerships between men and women of different communities helped to form alliances and closer ties.
What the experts say: "This is a milestone for understanding how societies were structured in the past," says archaeologist Philipp Stockhammer of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. | | | • Many algebra problems use x as a variable to stand in for an unknown quantity. But why is x the letter chosen for this role? | 6 min read | | | • At least 36 people have now been confirmed dead from the fires in Maui. We've updated our coverage to include the latest details. | 2 min read | | | • The world's oldest moss has lived through ice ages and mass extinctions, and endured age after age of natural warming and cooling. But now the climate is warming too quickly for it to adapt.| 2 min read | | | Takakia is the world's oldest known moss. Credit: Stu Crawford/Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) | | | • Historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions provide an excellent example of how to bolster science, technology, engineering and math training for students from underrepresented groups, write Joseph L. Graves, Jr., Stacy C. Farina and K Amacker. "We call for robust private, state and federal financial investment in minority-serving schools, which excel at training Black, brown and Indigenous STEM students and preparing them to be innovators in their chosen fields," they write. Graves is a professor of biology at North Carolina A&T State University; Farina is an assistant professor in the department of biology at Howard University; and Amacker is a graduate student in evolution at Howard. | 7 min read | | | This isn't the first time we've learned that the gender dynamics in old or ancient societies were not quite what we assumed. Last year we published a fantastic feature showing that the manufacture and trade of textiles, all conducted by women, were likely the backbone of the Viking economy. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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