Best of Last Week – Entangling 3 light particles, repeating cosmic radio bursts and tea reducing risk of heart attacks

March 7, 2016 • by Bob Yirka

(ScienceX)—It was another good week for physics as a trio of researchers with the University of Siegen in Germany found evidence of an extreme violation of local realism in quantum hypergraph states—suggesting that they may serve as a useful resource for certain quantum technologies.

A team at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology found clues to the mystery of what causes lightning—while observing narrow bipolar events, they found a new type of discharge called a fast positive breakdown. And a combined team of researchers from Spain and Austria caused three 'twisted' photons in three dimensions to occur by entangling three particles of light, a new milestone in quantum physics. Also, a team of researchers in Germany announced progress toward Star Trek's technology becoming reality, as they demonstrated via an experiment that teleportation is possible not just with quantum particles but in the classical world as well.

In news from space, an international team of astronomers reported that mysterious cosmic radio bursts were found to repeat—the source is well beyond the edges of the Milky Way and it represents the first known instance of such type to occur more than once. Another international team used data from Hubble to break the cosmic distance record—they measured the distance to the most remote galaxy ever seen.

In other news, a team of researchers in the U.S. announced that they had made a key improvement in solar cell technology—by overcoming a limitation that has stymied researchers for decades. Also, a team of researchers in the U.S. reported that their studies have shown that the Zika virus infects human neural stem cells, which results in cell death, and comes close to proving that the virus causes microcephaly. And there was a report by Robert Losey with the University of Alberta exploring the close prehistoric relationship between humans and dogs.

And finally, if you, like many people, are concerned about the health of your heart, you might be interested in a report by researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore—they found that a daily cup of tea may soothe your heart—just one cup a day, they found resulted in people having a 35 percent less chance of having a heart attack.