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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • There absolutely are, but I’m not super familiar with all of the consequences of majorana neutrinos. /u/drail@fedia.io might be able to provide a better answer. My background is experimental nuclear physics, so I’m familiar a lot of experiments searching for beyond the standard model physics, but less so with the theory motivation.

    One consequence of neutrinos being their own antiparticles is that it breaks lepton number conservation. This also breaks chiral symmetry, since all neutrinos are right-handed and anti-neutrinos are left-handed. This observation would also imply that neutrinos have mass - which is assumed but would be a really big deal to prove.



  • Despite space being “empty” there’s still a surprising amount of stuff streaming through it. There are protons, electrons, carbon nuclei, etc constantly slamming into the Earth’s atmosphere, producing showers of radiation. These cosmic rays are the reason so many sensitive physics experiments ( like dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay searches) are located deep underground. The earth is a good shield against these cosmic backgrounds.

    Even if there was an “isolated” antimatter galaxy, it would get bombarded with matter in the form of cosmic rays. The annihilation photons are a really distinct signal that would be hard to miss. There are a number of gamma ray telescopes in space that map out sources of gammas, and they would have detected an antimatter galaxy if it existed.

    If the antimatter galaxies are so far away that they’re beyond the visible universe, then there’s still the big question of why there was a segregation of matter and antimatter early on.


  • You’re not alone; matter-antimatter asymmetry is one of the big open questions in physics. Most particle processes treat matter and antimatter identically, but there are a few areas where matter and antimatter have slightly different interactions. These occurrences are violations of Charge Parity symmetry aka CP Violation.

    There must have been a certain amount of CP violation during the early phases of the Big Bang to explain our matter-dominated universe. But the known amounts of CP Violation are nowhere near enough to explain the asymmetry in matter and antimatter. There are some proposed mechanisms that would violate CP symmetry in sufficient quantities, but these haven’t been experimentally observed. There are ongoing searches to detect these processes, or related processes that would be possible if these existed. Neutrinoless double beta decay searches are one example of these detection efforts.

    In summary, there’s a guaranteed Nobel Prize to whoever can answer your question.







  • macarthur_park@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.worldOzone hole goes large again
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    9 months ago

    Lots of doom and gloom in the comments here. As the article describes, the hole in the ozone layer varies in size over time. It is slowly recovering, but the annual variability means it sometimes is larger than before.

    The variability of the size of the ozone hole is largely determined by the strength of a strong wind band that flows around the Antarctic area. This strong wind band is a direct consequence of Earth’s rotation and the strong temperature differences between polar and moderate latitudes.

    If the band of wind is strong, it acts like a barrier: air masses between polar and temperate latitudes can no longer be exchanged. The air masses then remain isolated over the polar latitudes and cool down during the winter.

    Although it may be too early to discuss the reasons behind the current ozone concentrations, some researchers speculate that this year’s unusual ozone patterns could be associated with the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in January 2022.

    And

    Claus concludes, “Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050.”


  • Seek by iNaturalist

    The app uses AI to identify the species of plants, animals, insects and fungi. In video mode you scan around something you want to ID as the AI narrows it down to the species. Then you can take a pic. The app keeps track of each unique species you’ve found (along with your photo of it). There’s also badges and achievements for identifying different numbers of species, if you want to gamify your nature sightseeing.

    It’s basically real life Pokémon. Oh and it’s completely free.









  • Yeesh, you guys have been working on this app for less than 2 months and already a few of your users have developed a serious sense of entitlement.

    Take it as a compliment, you’ve set an insanely high bar with Memmy - both in terms of its current state and the speed at which you made it. Please keep up the good work, and don’t let a few overly dramatic critics ruin it for you. They definitely don’t speak for the majority of your users.