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^{CAS in the Media} _{Arts and Sciences Media Headlines}

The surface of Mars is probably too toxic for bacteria to survive

July 12, 2017 will.ferguson

Mars is not a very welcoming place. It’s cold, there’s hardly any atmosphere, and its bombarded with deep space radiation. Even the soil wants to kill you; as the Phoenix lander confirmed in 2009, the Martian regolith is laced with perchlorates—chlorine-based compounds that, when heated up, can rip apart organic materials, like cells and their building blocks.

To try to find out exactly what those perchlorates might do to Martian microorganisms, researchers at the University of Edinburgh pitted bacteria against this compound in a battery of tests. What they found does not bode well for the search for life on Mars: Under Mars-like conditions, the perchlorates were indeed toxic to the microbes.

“We knew before that any life would have an incredibly hard time to survive on the surface, and this study experimentally confirms that,” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

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Popular Science

Quantum tractor beam could tug atoms, molecules

June 6, 2017 will.ferguson

The wavelike properties of quantum matter could lead to a scaled-down version of Star Trek technology. A new kind of tractor beam could use a beam of particles to reel in atoms or molecules, physicists propose in the May 5 Physical Review Letters.

“The idea is very reasonable,” says Philip Marston of Washington State University in Pullman. Although the results are still theoretical, “I think somebody will probably find some way to demonstrate this in the lab,” Marston says.

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Science News

‘Negative mass’ created at Washington State University

April 10, 2017 will.ferguson

Washington State University physicists have created a fluid with negative mass, which is exactly what it sounds like. Push it, and unlike every physical object in the world we know, it doesn’t accelerate in the direction it was pushed. It accelerates backwards.

The phenomenon is rarely created in laboratory conditions and can be used to explore some of the more challenging concepts of the cosmos, said Michael Forbes, a WSU assistant professor of physics and astronomy and an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington. The research appears today in the journal Physical Review Letters, where it is featured as an “Editor’s Suggestion.”

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Metallic hydrogen finally made in lab at mind-boggling pressure

January 27, 2017 will.ferguson

Metallic hydrogen has been created in the lab for the first time, by squeezing a sample of the element to pressures beyond what exists at the centre of the Earth. The creation of a substance first predicted more than 80 years ago could one day lead to superfast computers or souped-up rocket fuel.

“If this experiment is reproducible, it solves experimentally one of the major outstanding problems in all of physics,” says Jeffrey McMahon at Washington State University in Pullman.

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New Scientist

Ripples in spacetime: Science’s 2016 Breakthrough of the Year

January 25, 2017 will.ferguson

Washington State University researchers and adjunct faculty were part of the international research team that discovered gravitational waves in 2016. Science Magazine recently named the discovery its 2016 Breakthrough of the Year. The achievement fulfilled a prediction made 100 years ago by Albert Einstein and capped a 40-year quest to spot the ripples in spacetime.

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Science Magazine