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Atom containing an antiproton, the proton’s antimatter equivalent, in place of an electron has an unexpected response to laser light when immersed in superfluid helium, reports the ASACUSA collaboration at CERN

Established in 1954 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is a European research organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Its full name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) and the CERN acronym comes from the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

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GitHub Copilot, the text-to-code AI tool, has been—for the most part—revolutionary in determining how people code. Twitter has been erupting with people expressing how this new AI tool has benefitted them with organisation heads and developers alike hailing it for saving much of their time.

However, the latest discussion surrounding it suggests that things are murky.

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Researchers at Europe’s science lab CERN, who regularly use particle physics to challenge our understanding of the universe, are also applying their craft to upend the limits to cancer treatment.

The physicists here are working with giant particle accelerators in search of ways to expand the reach of cancer radiation therapy, and take on hard-to-reach tumours that would otherwise have been fatal.

In one CERN lab, called CLEAR, facility coordinator Roberto Corsini stands next to a large, linear particle accelerator consisting of a 40-metre metal beam with tubes packed in aluminium foil at one end, and a vast array of measurement instruments and protruding colourful wires and cables.

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Within the next decade, NASA’s DAVINCI mission plans to send a descent sphere whistling through the atmosphere of Venus, collecting not only samples of its atmosphere but also high-resolution images of the planet’s surface. But Venus is a deeply inhospitable place, with surface temperatures hotter than an oven and pressure so great it is like being 900 meters underwater. Now, NASA has shared more details about one of the DAVINCI mission’s instruments and how it will collect vital data in this most challenging of environments.

DAVINCI’s VASI instrument (Venus Atmospheric Structure Investigation) will be responsible for taking readings of the atmosphere as the descent sphere drops through the atmosphere on its 63-minute-long fall to the surface, including collecting data on temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction. This should help answer some long-open questions about the planet’s atmosphere, particularly its lower atmosphere, which remains a mystery in many ways.

“There are actually some big puzzles about the deep atmosphere of Venus,” said the science lead for the VASI instrument, Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in a statement. “We don’t have all the pieces of that puzzle and DAVINCI will give us those pieces by measuring the composition at the same time as the pressure and temperature as we get near the surface.”

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A long-term antimatter storage device that may be energized by a low power magnetron and can function autonomously for hundreds of hours on the energy provided by batteries. An evacuated, cryogenic container is arranged with a source of positrons and a source of electrons positioned in capture relation to one another within the container so as to allow for the formation of a plurality of positronium atoms. A microwave resonator is located within the container forming a circularly polarized standing wave within which the plurality of positronium atoms rotate. Radioactive sources for small stores and low energy positron accelerators for large stores are used to efficiently fill the device with positronium in seconds to minutes. The device may also be arranged to provide for the extraction of positrons. A method for storing antimatter is also provided.

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The present set of complementary inventions refer to a system for the practical and inexpensive procurement of huge amounts of energy derived from the principles of matter-antimatter generation and annihilation. The generator will comprise the functions of generation, amplification, concentration and collision of photons within a specially designed self-reflective chamber; the generation of particles of matter and antimatter derived from the collision of photons; the ionization of atoms and the production of avalanches of electrons and positrons within a specialized collecting chamber; the separation of electrons and positrons by the action of powerful rotational electromagnetic fields; and, the conversion of said avalanches of electrons and positrons into electrical power.

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