Electron Mass Measured to Record-Breaking Precision

Scientists in Germany said Wednesday they had made the most precise measurement yet of the mass of the electron, one of the building blocks of matter.

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LHC Collides At Record Speeds

The Large Hadron Collider is breaking records by smashing protons together at record energies. Discovery News' James Williams and Ian O'Neill explain what's going on and why it matters.

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The feat should provide a useful tool for scientists testing the "Standard Model" of physics -- the most widely-accepted theory of the particles and forces that comprise the Universe, they said.

ANALYSIS: Higgs Boson Discovery = Cosmic Doomsday?

Electrons are particles with a negative electrical charge that orbit the nucleus of an atom.

They were discovered in 1897 by Britain's Joseph John ("J.J.") Thomson, who dubbed them "corpuscles" -- a name later changed to "electron" because of its connection with electrical charge.

A team led by Sven Sturm of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg "weighed" electrons using a device called a Penning trap, which stores charged particles in a combination of magnetic and electrical fields.

They measured a single electron that was bound to a carbon nucleus whose mass was already known.

ANALYSIS: LHC Discovery Maims Supersymmetry, Again

The electron has 0.000548579909067 of an atomic mass unit, the measurement unit for particles, according to the calculation, which factors in variables for statistical and experimental uncertainties.

The estimate is a 13-fold improvement in accuracy on previous attempts at determining the electron's mass.

"This result lays the foundation for future fundamental physics experiments and precision tests of the Standard Model," according to the study published in the journal Nature.

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Einstein’s Lost Theory Describes a Universe Without a Big Bang

Einstein with Edwin Hubble, in 1931, at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, looking through the lens of the 100-inch telescope through which Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe in 1929. Courtesy of the Archives, Calif Inst of Technology. In 1917, a year after Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was published—but still two years before he would become the international celebrity we know—Einstein chose to tackle the entire universe . For anyone else, this might seem an exceedingly ambitious task—but this was Einstein. Einstein began by applying his field equations of gravitation to what he considered to be the entire universe. The field equations were the mathematical essence of his general theory of relativity, which extended Newton’s theory of gravity to realms where speeds approach that of light and masses are very large. But his math was better than he wanted to believe—...

There’s a Previously Undiscovered Organ in Your Body, And It Could Explain How Cancer Spreads

Ever heard of the interstitium? No? That’s OK, you’re not alone — scientists hadn’t either. Until recently. And, hey, guess what — you’ve got one! The interstitium is your newest organ. Scientists identified it for the first time because they are better able to observe living tissues at a microscopic scale, according to a recent study published in Scientific Reports , Scientists had long believed that connective tissue surrounding our organs was a thick, compact layer. That’s what they saw when they looked at it in the lab, outside the body, at least. But in a routine endoscopy (exploration of the gastrointestinal tract), a micro camera revealed something unexpected: When observed in a living body, the connective tissue turned out to be “an open, fluid-filled space supported by a lattice made of thick collagen bundles,” pathologist and study author Neil Theise told Research Gate . This network of channels is present throughout ...

First light-bending calculator designed with metamaterials

Exotic materials that bend light in extreme ways could be used to perform complex mathematical operations, creating a new kind of analogue computer. Tools for manipulating light waves have taken off in recent years thanks to the development of metamaterials . These materials have complex internal structures on scales smaller than the wavelength of the light they interact with, and so they produce unusual effects. Most famously, metamaterials promise to deliver " invisibility cloaks " that can route light around an object, making it seem to disappear. Nader Engheta at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and his colleagues decided to explore a different use for metamaterials, one that adapts the old idea of analogue computing . Today's digital computers are based on electrical switches that are either on or off. But before these machines were analogue computers based on varying electrical or mechanical properties. The slide rule is one example...

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