Best of Last Week – Confirming the majorana particle, a new earthrise image and forgetting so that you can learn

December 21, 2015 • by Bob Yirka

(ScienceX)—It was another good week for physics as a NIMS MANA team in China took a major step toward confirming the existence of the majorana particle—a fermion that is equivalent to its own antiparticle and which could play a major role in the development of a true quantum computer. Also a team working at LUX, the underground facility in North Dakota, offered new results from the world's most sensitive dark matter detector—they still have not yet detected dark matter, but they report that they have improved the sensitivity of their instruments by a factor of 20.

In news from space research, an international team studying data from the Hubble telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope conducted the largest ever comparative study of exoplanet atmospheres and claimed to have solved the missing water mystery—cloud-free exoplanets were hiding it in their atmospheres. Also NASA released a new high-resolution earthrise image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which they describe as stunning. And researchers working on the VERITAS project reported detecting gamma rays from a galaxy halfway across the visible universe.

In other news, a team of researchers working at Perdue University described a new 'Hydricity' concept that uses solar energy to produce power round-the-clock. It is a system where solar energy is used to heat water to drive turbines that are used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and also combines carbon with agricultural biomass to make a variety of products such as food, fuel, heat or electricity. Also, there was an interesting study done by a team of neurologists from Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands—they discovered a new gait pattern among top Russian officials, which they believe may be related to weapons training the men received during their time in the KGB. They call it the "gunslinger's gait." Also interesting was the reporting of a bone found in northern China that a team of Chinese and Australian researchers claimed indicated that the 'Red Deer Cave people' were a mysterious species of human. And just in time for the holiday season, a team of researchers affiliated with Copenhagen University reported that they had localized the Christmas spirit in the brain.

And finally if you have ever wondered if you had to give up some of the things you might have stored in your memory when making room for new things, a team of researchers with University of Glasgow's Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology suggested that their study indicated that forgetting is key to learning.