It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. September’s list includes a tantalizing hint of the elusive dark matter at the LUX-ZEPLIN detector; entangled Z bosons at the Large Hadron Collider; possible use of psychoactive substances in the Late Pleistocene; and an intriguing technical description of a telescope attributed to Galileo.
Physicists believe dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of matter in our universe, with the strongest candidate being WIMPs. But directly detecting them has eluded physicists for decades. We might have our first glimpse, courtesy of the LUX-ZEPLIN detector buried deep in a gold mine in South Dakota. Those potentially exciting results were presented at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan, with a preprint on arXiv. The signal is just a hint, well below the threshold needed to confirm discovery, and might be a statistical fluke.
Cornell University physicist N. David Mermin once described quantum entanglement as “the closest thing we have to magic.” Albert Einstein dubbed it “spooky action at a distance.” In 2023, physicists found evidence of entanglement between top quarks at the LHC’s ATLAS experiment. Now ATLAS physicists have observed entanglement in pairs of Z bosons, published in Physical Review Letters. Z bosons are extremely short-lived, decaying into electrons and muons, and the detector tracks those decay patterns to infer spins.
Source: Ars Technica · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing