Scientists led by Asor and colleagues developed a technique to directly observe individual virus-like particles as their protein shells form, publishing the results in Nature. The method allowed them to measure the speed and energy changes of shell assembly, something previously very difficult to track experimentally.
nature.com
· 2026-09-16
Scientists purified and structurally analyzed SC003-mi3, an engineered virus-like particle derived from i3-01 with cysteine mutations and a SpyCatcher domain for attaching other proteins. Using E. coli expression, ammonium sulfate precipitation and dialysis, they produced pure particles suitable for detailed molecular observation of how the nanoparticle assembles itself.
nature.com
· 2026-09-16
CERN's BASE-STEP experiment built a compact catching trap using 15 stacked electrodes and magnetic confinement to capture antiprotons from a degraded beam, cool them with cotrapped electrons, and clean out contaminant particles like electrons and negative ions through voltage ramping and dipolar drives. The particles are then moved into a compensated Penning trap at the center of the device for stable, non-destructive detection and storage.
nature.com
· 2026-09-16
Journalist Alex Weprin interviewed Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated digital 'actor' created by Xicoia, a division of Particle 6 Group, without a company handler moderating the conversation. Norwood failed to give concrete details about its upcoming film 'Misaligned,' offered only vague plot descriptions, and avoided commenting substantively on current events, at one point claiming 'All Lives Matter' and arguing AI films are environmentally friendly.
wired.com
· 2026-09-15
CERN engineers announced at a Winterthur conference that the lab will shift over 2,200 machines from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Debian. The move stems from RHEL 9 and 10's newer compiler requirements, which drop support for older CPU architectures still used in many of CERN's embedded control systems.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-05
Researchers on the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, led in part by Brown University scientists, detected a single particle interaction consistent with a WIMP dark matter candidate of at least 200 GeV/c2 mass. The signal reached only 2.6-sigma statistical significance, far below the 5-sigma threshold needed to claim discovery, but stood out because background noise in that region is unusually low.
science.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-02
CERN halted its injector complex and Antimatter Factory this morning, stopping the final proton and ion beams that had continued running since the LHC itself went dark in June. This completes the transition into Long Shutdown 3, a multi-year pause across the entire accelerator chain. Engineers used the last weeks of operation to gather performance data and finish physics measurements before maintenance begins.
home.cern
· 2026-08-31
CERN researchers and international collaborators generated quark-gluon plasma—the hot, dense matter thought to have existed microseconds after the Big Bang—by colliding oxygen-16 and neon-20 nuclei, elements far lighter than the lead atoms typically used for such experiments. The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, show this exotic state of matter can form in much smaller collisions than previously assumed.
wired.com
· 2026-08-30
CERN is proceeding with a major upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider intended to significantly increase the rate of particle collisions, giving physicists more data to search for phenomena beyond the Standard Model. This follows years in which the collider largely confirmed existing theoretical predictions without producing the unexpected results many researchers had hoped for.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-08-27
Particle, the AI newsreader startup started by ex-Twitter engineers, has launched Radar, a search engine that transcribes and semantically indexes over 130,000 podcasts to surface quotes and highlights. The product grew out of a popular clip-sourcing feature in Particle's news app and is now offered as a standalone API for AI agents and data buyers, including hedge funds and search platforms like Exa.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-08-26