Daily Archives: 11 Jun 11

Densest Matter Created in Big-Bang Machine

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Particle physics is one of the disciplines stu...

‘A superhot substance recently made in the Large Hadron Collider (pictures) is the densest form of matter ever observed, scientists announced this week.

Known as a quark-gluon plasma, the primordial state of matter may be what the entire universe was like in the immediate aftermath of the big bang.

The exotic material is more than a hundred thousand times hotter than the inside of the sun and is denser than a neutron star, one of the densest known objects in the universe.

“Besides black holes, there’s nothing denser than what we’re creating,” said David Evans, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and a team leader for the LHC’s ALICE detector, which helped observe the quark-gluon plasma.

“If you had a cubic centimeter of this stuff, it would weigh 40 billion tons.” ‘ (via National Geographic).

Prozac Killing E. coli in the Great Lakes

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Fluoxetine HCl 20mg Capsules (Prozac)

“When antidepressant pills get flushed down the drain, they do more than create happier sewers.

Scientists in Erie, Pennsylvania, have found that minute concentrations of fluoxetine, the active ingredient in Prozac, are killing off microbial populations in the Great Lakes.

Traces of antidepressants such as Prozac have been found in both drinking and recreational water supplies throughout the world, in quantities experts say are too dilute to affect humans but which have been found to damage the reproductive systems of mollusks and may even affect the brains of animals like fish.” (via National Geographic).