Science Saturday 03/23

Welcome to Science Saturday everyone. Here’s what happened this week:

ScienceDaily: Methane Vents

Scientists studying plumes of bubbles that rise from the seafloor off of the coast of Washington State have discovered that the vents follow a geologic fault line. Continuing to study the vents, of which there are as many as 17,000, researchers may be able to infer what may happen when a major earthquake strikes this fault.

Science Magazine: Neuroscience in Philosophy

Since Philosophy’s beginnings in Ancient Greece, we’ve been searching for the answer to a particularly profound question: Do humans have free will. As our understanding of neuroscience has advanced over the past one-hundred years, many neuroscientists have weighed in. So far, a definitive answer to this question hasn’t been found. That might change now, though with a new research program across 17 major universities, backed by $7 million of funding.

LiveScience: Large Hadron Collider and the Origin of Everything

We’ve known for quite some time now that antimatter exists. Every subatomic particle has an anti-particle of equal mass but opposite charge that cancels it out. The problem here is that if the big bang actually happened, (it did) how did all matter avoid cancelling itself out and leaving behind pure energy? The answer may have just been found by a study using the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC detected a differential in rate of decay between a certain quark and its anti-quark. This would allow a small percentage of matter to survive the collision between the two particles.

Futurism: Old Fusion Technology, New Experiments

More news on the Fusion front: a tokamak reactor is a type of fusion reactor which works by confining high energy magnetic fields to control charged particles called plasma. Once both temperature and pressure levels are right, colliding particles release massive amounts of energy. The thing is, Tokomaks have never actually been good at doing that. That might could change due to recent developments though. A team of scientists achieved high pressure plasma — perhaps laying the groundwork to achieve fusion power by reversing the orientation of the vessel that houses the plasma. And they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

More on Fusion here!

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the weekend.

P.S. Happy Birthday Chris.