“Scientists at CERN have transported antimatter by truck for the first time in history. The goal is to eventually distribute antiprotons to other laboratories in Europe,” reports The Doomslayer.
CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics, located on the border between France and Switzerland, near Geneva. CERN uses massive particle accelerators—such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—to study the forces that govern the universe.
CERN explains:
Today, in a world first, a team of scientists from the BASE experiment at CERN successfully transported a trap filled with antiprotons in a truck across the Laboratory’s main site. The team managed to accumulate a cloud of 92 antiprotons in an innovative portable cryogenic Penning trap, then disconnect it from the experimental facility, load it onto a truck and continue experiment operation after transport. This is a remarkable achievement, given that antimatter is very difficult to preserve, as it annihilates upon contact with matter. This world premiere is a test, the ultimate aim being to transport antiprotons to other European laboratories, such as Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), where very-high-precision measurements of the antiproton properties could be performed.
In December, it was reported that antimatter production had radically increased due to a scientific advance, and that “researchers at CERN have developed a new technique that can produce over 15 thousand antihydrogen atoms in just a few hours, a major improvement over earlier methods, which typically generated a few thousand atoms over an entire day. The new method could make antimatter experiments much faster and allow researchers to collect higher-quality data.”
In other news, scientists have developed a tiny robot that can deliver drugs to remote places in the body (by traveling through blood vessels) and then dissolve.
Nanorobots are also being used to fight cancer. “In a major advancement in nanomedicine, Arizona State University scientists…have successfully programmed nanorobots to shrink tumors by cutting off their blood supply.” Scientists have also developed tiny robots made of human cells to repair damaged cells.
