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The Importance of Cave and Karst Systems

Cave and karst systems are important for two major reasons. First, the overwhelming majority of the nation's freshwater resources is groundwater. About 25% of the groundwater is located in cave and karst regions. The protection and management of these vital water resources are critical to public health and to sustainable economic development. As ...

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ImportanceofCaveaKarstSystems
Biology

Will That Be One Hump or Two?

Camels are highly adaptive to their environments. Often called the ships of the desert, they have been domesticated by humans for thousands of years, as beasts of burden and as transportation. What ... Continue reading

Humps
Astronomy

Light Fantastic

On the next hot summer day, imagine what would happen if the Sun suddenly became one million times brighter. Ice cream would quickly melt, sunscreen lotion wouldn't work very well, and that's just the ... Continue reading

LightFantastic
Physics

Does Earth Have Its Own Neon Sign?

You might wonder what the Northern Lights and neon signs have in common. Actually, a lot! What makes luminous colors shimmer across the Northern sky? The answer is in the Sun. Charged particles ... Continue reading

NorthernLights
Mathematics

Perfect Numbers

Some numbers are more special than others. According to Pythagoras (569 BC - 475 BC) and Euclid (325 BC - 265 BC), some are so special that they called them mystical or perfect numbers. The first ... Continue reading

PerfectNumbers

Antimatter Discovery

AntimatterDiscoveryIn almost every science fiction movie ever made, you are bound to hear about antimatter –– matter-antimatter propulsion drives, whole galaxies made of antimatter, and so on. Antimatter has been used in science fiction so much that some of us are not even sure if it is real or just imaginary. Here's a hint: antimatter is real and it was discovered a long time ago.

It all started with Paul Dirac, a British physicist, who in 1930 devised the first relativistic theory of the electron. Quantum mechanics had been worked out a couple of years earlier (by Dirac and by Heisenberg, independently), but Dirac’s 1930 theory contained math that exactly modeled electron behavior, both from the quantum mechanical and from the relativistic point of view (electrons moving at close to light speeds). His theory also predicted the existence of an anti-electron; a particle just like an electron, with the same mass but opposite charge (i.e. positive) and opposite magnetic momentum. If you fire such a particle into a magnetic field which is perpendicular to the particle’s trajectory, its path would curve opposite to that of an electron.

In 1932, Carl Anderson, a US physicist, while examining tracks of particles produced by cosmic rays, noticed one track whose curvature was identical to that of an electron but was flipped. Instead of curving to the right, it curved to the left. He named this positively charged electron a positron, the first antimatter particle discovered. Many anti-particles have been discovered since. The anti-proton was discovered in 1955 by E. Segre and his coworkers at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory using a high-energy particle accelerator. Most other anti-particles have been discovered at particle accelerators under carefully designed conditions. Many experimental groups have also reported constructing bigger entities than just anti-particles. In fact, whole anti-nuclei have been constructed, for example anti-hydrogen nuclei and an isotope of anti-helium.