Majorana fermions might be the sole component of the dark matter in our Universe

The find is the culmination of decades of research. First theorized by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937 by building on the work of Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac, the Majorana fermion emitted too weak a signal to be spotted within most materials. Recently, however, theoretical physicists have suggested that some exotic materials might circumvent defects and impurities found elsewhere and allow for the detection of this elusive particle.

Building on this knowledge, Kouwenhoven connected indium antimonide nanowires to a circuit with a gold contact at one end and a slice of superconductor at the other, and then exposed the circuit to a moderate magnetic field. Measurements of the electrical conductance of the nanowires showed a peak at zero voltage that is consistent with the formation of a pair of Majorana particles.

Conceptual close-up of the Majorana nano-device

This special kind of fermion has the unique property of being its own antiparticle. An antiparticle is defined as a subatomic particle having the same mass as a given particle, but opposite electric or magnetic properties – for instance, the antiparticle of a negatively-charged electron is a positively-charged positron. The unique properties of Majorana fermions generate an interesting behavior whenever two particles interact.

Elementary particles come in two kinds: bosons, such as photons, and fermions, such as electrons. Besides having different charge and spin properties, they also behave quite differently when two particles of the same kind interact with each other.

When two bosons trade places, there is no change in their quantum mechanical state, and they become interchangeable; when two normal fermions trade places, the sign of their mathematical "wavefunction" changes from positive to negative with each switch, returning to their original state after two switches. Majorana fermions, on other hand, "remember" their previously taken path.

This property makes Majorana fermions a very strong candidate for use in quantum computers. While we’ve seen a number of developments in quantum computing in recent years, from qubits in semiconductors to manipulating quantum informationthrough electrical fields, one longstanding issue is that the qubits – "quantum bits," the basic unit of information in a quantum computer – are unstable and highly sensitive to external influences.

Not so with this particle, which promises to be unaffected by external influences (even though, it should be pointed out, it’s not yet entirely clear whether qubits created in this manner will be long-lived enough to be used in that way).

More broadly, the "memory" of these particles could be a crucial factor that will enable researchers to more effectively crack some of the long-standing mysteries of quantum mechanics once and for all, helping to investigate the behavior of other particles.

Also, as some researchers suggest, the particles may play a crucial role in cosmology – a proposed theory assumes that the mysterious dark matter, which is thought to form around 73 percent of our Universe, is composed entirely of Majorana fermions.

The video below illustrates the process by which Kouwenhoven’s team managed to isolate the fermions.

Toshiba Vegetable Recognizer

The device comes with a large database of items it can recognize, even from a distance. It can be trained with additional items when necessary.

Asteroid Fly-By

On January 31, the 20-mile-long asteroid Eros makes its closest pass by Earth in 37 years. It will miss us by 16.5 million miles, but that’s still close enough for amateur astronomers to see it with a small telescope.

A New Human Emerges

Archaeologists will get a clearer picture of human evolution this fall when they begin analyzing the complete skeleton of Little Foot, a small hominid found deep inside a cave in Sterkfontein, South Africa (entrance pictured), that may be more than three million years old.

Ocean Secrets Revealed

Autonomous underwater vehicles, also known as gliders, will deliver data on water density and plankton counts near Oregon and New England this fall—the first concrete results from the ambitious Ocean Observatories Initiative, a wide-reaching network of undersea sensors and other monitoring devices.

Super Supercomputer

By May, IBM will finish building a computer that churns through 20 petaflops, or 20 quadrillion calculations a second, double the current record. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (aerial view pictured) will use the new machine, called Sequoia, to perform simulations of nuclear explosions and weather systems.

Tesla Offers a Luxury Sedan

Tesla, better known for its high-end Roadster, will begin delivery of its $77,400 (before tax credits) Model S sedan [see “Luxe Electric,” page 14], which will use lithium-ion cells similar to its sibling and travel up to 300 miles per charge.

Turing Turns 100

Alan Turing, a founding father of artificial intelligence, was born on June 23, 1912. Computer scientists around the world are celebrating his centenary with conferences, museum exhibits and competitions, called Turing Tests, to find a computer program that can convince a human that it is human too.

Largest Offshore Wind Farm

The first 175 turbines of the London Array wind farm, which sits 12 miles off the English coast, will generate up to 630 megawatts of power by year’s end—more than twice the current record and enough to power 470,000 homes.

California Cap-and-Trade

This summer, California will kick off the country’s largest carbon-swap agreement by selling the right to emit greenhouse gases. Polluters can redeem these allowances in 2013, when a limit on emissions kicks in. Estimated price: $15 per metric ton. A typical power plant’s discharge: 150,000 tons.

Curiosity Explores Mars

On August 6, the largest rover yet—the size of a car rather than a golf cart—will land on the Red Planet. Curiosity is carrying new equipment that will drill into rocks, analyze their chemistry, and look for compounds that support life.

Fracking Under Scrutiny

The Environmental Protection Agency will release the first results of a study designed to answer a controversial question: Does hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas pollute drinking water? The researchers will study data from sites in four states and monitor drill locations before, during and after fracking.

Fusion Delivers Extra Energy

Researchers at the National Ignition Facility in California will attempt to produce a net energy gain from a nuclear fusion reaction by using 192 lasers to crush a hydrogen-filled target. Past fusion experiments have always consumed more energy than they created.

Salmon Stage a Comeback

State and federal agencies will return salmon to California’s newly flowing San Joaquin River, parts of which had been dry for 50 years. Researchers will study up to 2,000 tagged fish to see if a full salmon run can thrive.

Personal energy harvesting

While big ideas like solar, tidal and wind power certainly show promise, the IBM researchers believe that much of the energy used to run our homes will come from smaller, more personal sources. These could include things such as piezoelectric generators in our clothing, batteries that are charged by the spinning of our bicycles’ wheels, or turbines that are spun by the water flowing through our homes’ pipes. Essentially, anything that moves could be harnessed as a source of power.

Biological passwords

The days of having to memorize and keep track of alphanumeric passwords will come to an end, as biometrics take over. In order to authenticate our identities online and in person, we will use technologies such as retina scans, voice prints, fingerprint scans or face recognition.

Mind reading

Yep, mind reading. It won’t so much be about spying on other people’s private thoughts, however. Instead, it will involve things like controlling computers or other devices with our brain waves – if you want to call someone on your smartphone, for instance, you will just have to think about doing so in order to make it happen.

"Mind reading" will also be used to analyze the thought patterns of people with brain disorders, in order to help assist them in daily living, and to treat their condition.

No more information gap

While the world wide web has done much to disseminate information across the planet, its "world" hasn’t included people who can’t afford computers or smartphones, or who live in places lacking the infrastructure to connect such machines to the internet. With the rise of low-cost mobile devices, however, people in developing nations will gain full access to that world.

Farmers will be able to check weather reports to determine when to fertilize crops, patients will know when the visiting doctor is scheduled to be in town next, and financial transactions can be conducted without the need of a physical brick-and-mortar bank. The possibilities are endless.

Computers that know us

Presently, in the emails and other information updates we receive, we have to sift through a lot of stuff that doesn’t apply to us. Within five years, however, analytics and sensemaking technologies will allow our computers to "know" us, and filter out information that we don’t need.

It is even suggested that by combining our personal preferences and calendars, computers could proactively reserve tickets to a concert by our favorite rock band, if we were free on the date of the performance.

All the technologies on IBM’s latest list are already in development, so it’s not a huge stretch to state that they will gain prominence in years to come. Perhaps, however, there’s something that should have been on the "top five" list, but wasn’t. Do you think IBM missed anything?

The lens harvests energy from an external source using an antenna and has an integrated circuit to store the harvested power and transfer it to a transparent sapphire chip with a single blue LED. Unfortunately, while the range of the display was about one meter in free space, that range was reduced to about two centimeters when it was placed on the eye.

Another of the challenges facing the creation of a Terminator-style eye display is that the minimum focal distance of a human eye is only a few centimeters. This means that information displayed on a contact lens would appear blurry. To address this, the researchers used thin Fresnel lenses to magnify the display.

More research is needed before we’ll be able to read text on our eyeballs though. "We need to improve the antenna design and the associated matching network and optimize the transmission frequency to achieve an overall improvement in the range of wireless transmission," said Parviz, co-author of the study. "Our next goal, however, is to incorporate some predetermined text in the contact lens."

MagSurf, build by researchers at Universite Paris Diderot in France, flips the strange world of the quantum into a more sci-fi application, essentially turning a skateboard like platform into one big magnetic superconductor. Using liquid nitrogen, the team turn the platform super-cold, creating an electromagnetic field that is expelled from the inside of the board. It’s not quantum locking–the skateboard is too big to mimic that little super-cooled disc–but it provides enough outward magnetic force to float above a rail of permanent magnets.

It’s sort of like a Maglev train, and sort of not. But, says SmartPlanet, one group of researchers in Japan is reportedly working on scaling exactly this kind of technology into better levitating train tech. That sounds somewhat difficult, given the extremely low temperatures needed to make this kind of thing work.

Robot Troops of the Future Robo-Soldier wants to execute (an efficient, well-calculated plan).

Modern warfare relies increasingly on robotics for intelligence gathering and increasingly for strike capabilities, but the decision-making capacity still rests solely in the hands of human commanders. But British defense company BAE systems is testing a way to turn over battlefield decisions over to robot troops as well.

ALADDIN (Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information Networks) is BAE’s response to the overload of sensors and data now confronting battlefield commanders who now have UAV observations, soldier-based sensors, satellite data, and reams of other intelligence washing over them in such volumes that, as Air Force Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula puts it, they’ll be “swimming in sensors and drowning in data.” The system allows a network of robot soldiers to quickly collect and exchange information and then to bargain with each other to determine the best course of action and execute it.

The robots are armed to the teeth with algorithms employing a range of models – game theory, probabilistic modeling, optimization techniques – that let them predict outcomes and allocate battlefield resources far more quickly and efficiently than humans trying to process the same amount of data. All that should help troops – both robotic and otherwise – keep stay afloat in the data deluge.

But does it work? ALADDIN hasn’t seen any trigger time yet, but BAE and university researchers collaborating on the system have put it through simulated natural disasters (another potential application). Disasters, they theorize, are similar to warfare in their chaotic nature, and therefore the simulations are a good analog.

And in disasters the system operates well: Robots gather data on the various casualties in different areas, objectively assess where a limited number of ambulances can have the greatest possible impact, and execute a strategy quickly without egos or human emotions or errors clogging up the machinery. It’s like an auction for resources based on need, and while it may sound insensitive to auction off life-saving help to a bunch of machines, when this resource auction was eliminated from some simulations, some of the ambulances weren’t used at all because the system couldn’t figure out where to send them.

BAE is building what’s known as “flexible autonomy” into ALADDIN which will keep the higher decisions in the hands of humans (decisions like “go to war” and “don’t go to war,” for instance). And the idea of being able to crunch sensor data, raw intel, crowdsourced info from the Web, and other data sources to make good decisions quickly could prove invaluable. So while idea of robot armies with decision-making capabilities is terrifying to some, the allure of such high efficiency – be it in warfare or disaster response – is difficult to deny.

Stem Cell Exerts Pressure On Microscopic Posts, Reveals Its Own Future

Like a child, a stem cell can grow up to be just about anything. Eventually it picks a job, however, during a process called differentiation. Scientists can influence, if not always control, the outcome by applying compounds called growth factors. Now Jianping Fu, a biomedical and mechanical engineer at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues have discovered that the force exerted by a stem cell onto a surface is an important part of in both predicting and altering what type of cell it will develop into.

Fu placed a stem cell on a scaffold of 13-micron-long silicone posts and found that the amount of force the cell exerted on those posts indicated it would eventually become a fat cell. But he also found that when he stiffened the surface by shortening the posts, it caused the same line of stem cells to turn into bone. Knowing how to predict and manipulate the fate of stem cells will make therapies based on them—for spinal-injury repair, bone grafts, skin transplants—easier to develop.

Stephen Hawking, brilliant astrophysicist and nefarious alien doomsday prophet, is again atop his soapbox preaching the end of humanity should we not board spaceships and colonize the solar system and beyond.

He’s made the "get your ass to Mars or anywhere else but earth, humanity or die" prophecy claim before, mind you, but this time around he’s fine tuned it with a time range: Two centuries.

As in, if we can manage to survive on this rock for another two centuries without annihilating ourselves, we will stand a good chance at colonizing space and surviving even longer.

"The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load," he said in an interview with BigThink:

Stephen Hawking, Alien exist

Roll the Dice The building’s designer, Sybarite, hopes to make its design the standard for zero-emissions homes.

The Dice House looks like part of a Monopoly set, but the design has real-world ambitions. The 30-by-30-by-30-foot concept home, designed by the British architecture firm Sybarite, improves on standard building tech to erase its carbon footprint.

The centerpiece is a photovoltaic umbrella dome that collects roughly 90 percent of the house’s energy needs. Made of a common plastic, the pillowy dome traps heat like a greenhouse. That hot air warms water in a tank tucked under the roof, turning out a daily average of 80 bath-ready gallons, even on the darkest days of December. At the umbrella’s apex, a generator-equipped turbine produces electricity and, in chilly months, drives heat into the house. Photovoltaic cells studding the 484-square-foot dome floor create additional electricity.

Generating an estimated average of 33 kilowatt-hours per day, the house can power itself and charge a Tesla Roadster. And the building, submitted for a carbon-neutral housing competition, manages to stay comfortable year-round without air conditioning. The roof is covered in plants under the dome. Walls made of structural board stabilize temperatures. Windows circumscribed by a big dot—the “one” side of the die—absorb light from the sun-drenched south. And the compact footprint means less space to heat and cool.