Science digest 1/17

New state of matter created in cold gas

Scientists say they've created a new state of matter in a super-cold gas, a step that might someday help researchers create ultra-powerful "quantum" computers.

The work should also aid investigations into exotic behavior of atoms in solids, the kinds of phenomena used in computer disc drives and in superconductivity, the ability of some materials to conduct electricity without resistance.

The new work was reported in the Jan. 3 issue of the journal Nature by Immanuel Bloch, senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, with co-authors.

The best-known states of matter are solid, liquid and gas; a peculiar kind of gas called plasma is another. The term is also applied, somewhat more loosely, to other categories of matter with basic properties that keep them from fitting neatly into those categories.

Bloch and colleagues started with a Bose-Einstein condensate, an exotic kind of gas chilled to about minus 460 degrees. Such condensates are also considered a novel state of matter, and their creation a few years ago won the Nobel Prize in physics last year.

Atoms in Bose-Einstein condensates flow without friction, forming a so-called superfluid. In a sense, they act in such coordinated fashion they lose their individual identities and form one big superatom.

USDA says field testing biotech insect is safe

WASHINGTON -- The government has cleared the way for the first field tests of a genetically engineered insect, a moth that contains a jellyfish gene.

The Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service concluded Friday that the tests, which are to be conducted at an agency facility in Arizona, would not pose a risk to the environment.

The USDA agency regulates field trials of genetically engineered plants and insects and in this case its own scientists are also running the experiments. The pink bollworm moth was developed at a California university.

The jellyfish gene gives the moth larvae a fluorescence that allows them to be tracked. If this experiment is successful, the next step is to test a sterile version that will mate with wild relatives and eliminate their offspring. The pink bollworm is a major pest of cotton farmers in the Southwest.

Moths with the jellyfish gene will be set free under screened cages in a government-owned cotton field and studied to determine if they have show any unusual behavior. An agency spokesman said he did not know when the tests would start.

Scientists find Dead Sea is sinking even lower

LOS ANGELES -- The Dead Sea, already the lowest point on Earth, is sinking even lower.

Areas along the shores of the Dead Sea subsided by as much as 2.5 inches a year between 1992 and 1999, according to a new study. The region on the Israeli-Jordanian border lies about 1,360 feet below sea level.

The subsidence followed a drop in the water table around the Dead Sea, allowing the ground to settle and compact, according to scientists who published their findings in the January issue of the Geological Society of America Bulletin.

Water that would normally flow into the Dead Sea has steadily been siphoned off for agricultural and other uses in the thirsty region. As a consequence, the level of the body of water, among the world's saltiest, has fallen by about 20 feet over the past decade.

The study used seven years' worth of data from a pair of European radar satellites to examine changes in the level of the ground along the southern and western shores of the Dead Sea.

By comparing high-resolution radar images of the same area taken at varying intervals, scientists could pinpoint movements of the Earth that otherwise would be nearly imperceptible, unless the area was peppered with expensive global positioning system receivers that can track the minute changes.

--From wire reports