Best of Last Week – Detecting dark matter with GPS, a gel that stops bleeding and the benefits of fasting
(Phys.org) —It was an interesting time for physics last week as one team of researchers suggested that elusive dark matter may be detected with GPS satellites. They propose testing the idea that dark matter is arranged as groups of topological defects, and that it might be possible to detect such defects using data from a network of atomic clocks and GPS satellites by noting where they go out of sync. Meanwhile, another team has been studying magnetism with the roles of position and momentum reversed—in which the strength of the magnetic field depends on how fast a particle is moving instead of its location. They demonstrated a way to modify current experiments to study the motion of a quantum particle in a momentum-space magnetic field. And yet another team working at the LHCb announced that they'd observed two new baryon particles never seen before.