Droplets of condensation may make a cold can of beer look more appealing on a hot day, but they're also making that frosty brew warm up faster. So here's some news you can use: If it's hot and humid, put a cover over your can of cold beverage. And if you want to warm up a frozen can quickly, don't bake it. Steam it.

That's exactly what University of Washington researchers did in a series of experiments to show how the warming power of condensation applies to issues ranging from colder beer to hotter climates.

The beer-can study, published in the April issue of Physics Today, began a couple of years ago when UW atmospheric scientist Dale Durran was looking for a way to explain how condensation produced heat as the flip side of evaporative cooling. The cooling effect is well-known — we feel it when sweat evaporates to cool us off in the summer time, or when we turn on a mist cooler. But the flip side of the effect is less widely understood.

Durran figured out that the condensation on a cold aluminum can might serve as a handy illustration. He did a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation, and found that the heat released by water just 100 microns (four thousandths of an inch) thick should heat its contents by 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).

"I was surprised to think that such a tiny film of water would cause that much warming," Durran said in a UW news release.

He recruited a fellow atmospheric scientist at UW, Dargan Frierson, to conduct the initial experiment ... in Frierson's basement bathroom. First, they set a can of beverage on the toilet tank and warmed it up with a space heater. Then they took another can, turned on the shower and let the bathroom get nice and steamy. Each time they ran the experiment, the researchers stuck a thermometer through the can's pop-top opening and watched the temperature rise over the course of 15 minutes.

Mariusz Kaldon

Droplets of condensation on a chilly can are a signal that the temperature inside is rising.

Frierson said conditions got a little sticky in the steamed-up bathroom. "I think that's the most uncomfortable my research has ever made me — but it's all for science," he told NBC News.

Even though the air temperature was the same in both cases, the liquid in the steamed-up can warmed up twice as fast. The researchers followed up on the basement-bathroom findings with more rigorous lab experiments. Every time, the cans warmed up more quickly in more humid conditions.

The researchers even charted how quickly 12-ounce aluminum cans of chilled liquid should warm up, depending on different levels of temperature and humidity. For example, in five minutes, the can should get 6 degrees F (3 degrees C) warmer due to condensation amid New Orleans' typical summer conditions. The equivalent warm-up factor would be 3.5 degrees F (2 degrees C) in New York, and 2 degrees F (1 degree C) in Seattle. But in Dhahran, a Saudi city that ranks among the hottest, stickiest places in the world, the can would get about 14 degrees F (8 degrees C) warmer in five minutes.

That's why covering a cold can is a such a good idea on a steamy-hot summer day. "Probably the most important thing a beer koozie does is not simply insulate the can, but keep condensation from forming on the outside of it," Durran said.

The effects of condensation and evaporation are well-known to climatologists, but Durran and Frierson say the beer-can experiments can give the general public a better understanding of atmospheric dynamics.

"Condensation as a heat source is just tremendously important," Frierson said. "It's really like the gasoline that powers hurricanes, thunderstorms and tornadoes."

Some climate models suggest that there could be 25 percent more humidity in the atmosphere by the end of the 21st century, and that could lead to more bouts of extreme weather in the decades to come.

"We want people to appreciate how powerful this effect is," Durran told NBC News. "A very thin film around the can makes a big difference in the temperature of its contents, and that just makes you appreciate the importance of that same heating effect in our atmosphere."

Here's how to run the experiment described in the YouTube video from University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences Outreach:

1. Freeze two cans of your favorite beverage. This should take roughly seven hours, depending on your freezer.
2. Fifteen minutes before taking out the cans, preheat oven to 250 degrees F and start boiling water in a pot. Place a cookie rack on top of pot.
3. Take the cans out of freezer. Place one in the preheated oven. and one over the boiling pot. 
4. Start timer for 10 minutes. 
5. After 10 minutes, carefully remove cans from oven and pot.
6. Crack open both cans and pour into separate glasses.
7. Take a photo/video of the two cans and glasses, go to the UW YouTube page, and post a video response.

More beer-can science:

• Tiny sip of beer can produce burst of pleasure
• Study explains the science of a beer buzz
• Scientists study how beer goes bad

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET April 26: Would wiping off the drops of condensation keep your drink cooler? Sorry, says UW spokeswoman Hannah Hickey. "That will only make your drink even warmer," she writes in a Twitter update.

Update for 2:25 p.m. ET April 27: Some commenters are wondering why there's so much fuss over a relatively simple concept. The point of the exercise wasn't really to break new ground in atmospheric physics (or in summertime beverage consumption), but "to improve our intuition about the power of condensational heating" — which is a huge factor in climate dynamics. Durran explained further in a comment below, and I'm providing an extended version of his comments here to give them a little more visibility:

"In my class, students definitely need to know how condensation causes heating. Here's how. There are bonds that link water molecules together into a crystal lattice to form ice. It takes heat (energy) to break a few of those bonds and turn ice to liquid water. To evaporate the liquid water, the rest of the bonds between molecules need to be broken, which takes a lot more heat. Once all the bonds are broken, the liquid is converted to water vapor, an invisible gas.

"This processes reverses when water vapor is cooled enough to condense as liquid water. Bonds between molecules re-form, and the heat it took to originally break them is released into the surroundings.

"The reason we make a big deal about the power of condensational heating is that it does amazing things in the atmosphere, such as powering the updrafts in thunderstorms. The rising cloud-filled updrafts in the video linked below ascend like hot-air balloons because they are warmed, not by burning a fuel like propane, but by the heat released as water vapor condenses.

"Here's the video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVIwDoogncQ

"Such a visualization might help people understand some of the applications. (Only the last half of the Physics Today article was about the beer can heating.)"

Durran and Frierson are the authors of "Condensation, Atmospheric Motion, and Cold Beer" in Physics Today. Supplemental experiments are described in "An Experiment Uses Cold Beverages to Demonstrate the Warming Power of Latent Heat." Lab experiments were performed by Stella Choi and Steven Brey. Galen Richards and Jaycyl Golding, high school students serving as Pacific Science Center Discovery Corps interns, worked on earlier versions of the experiments. Instrument makers Allen Hart and Steven Domonkos built experimental apparatuses. Funding was provided by National Science Foundation grants AGS-0846641 and AGS-1138977.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Reidar Hahn / Fermilab

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment, or CDMS, adds new intrigue to the subatomic hunt.

Three potential signatures of exotic dark matter particles have been found hidden in the readings from an underground lab in Minnesota  — and although the results are too tentative to be classified as a discovery, scientists say they provide promising new clues to the solution of a decades-old mystery.

"People shouldn't come away from this thinking that we've found dark matter," Rupak Mahapatra, a physicist at Texas A&M University who is a principal investigator with the SuperCDMS collaboration, told NBC News. "Really, it's just the beginning. ... What we really need to do is make more detectors and run them, and be sure."

If the results are confirmed, that would point to the existence of a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP, that could help account for the 27 percent of the universe that is thought to consist of dark matter. Such matter seems to be invisible and is detected primarily through its gravitational effect. Another mysterious quality known as dark energy accounts for 68 percent of the universe. That leaves just 5 percent consisting of ordinary matter — the stuff that makes up everything we see around us.

Physicists have puzzled over the nature of dark matter since the 1930s, and billions of dollars have been spent building experiments to track it down. 

Finding, or fluke?
The three high-energy events were recorded in 2008 by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or CDMS, an experiment that was set up a decade ago nearly a half-mile (713 meters) underground in northern Minnesota's Soudan mine. That depth helps to shield the experiment from background cosmic rays that would overwhelm the signature of dark matter interactions at the surface.

The interactions seen by the CDMS team point to the existence of WIMPs with a best-guess mass of 8.6 billion electron volts, which would be about nine times as massive as the proton. Scientists calculated that there should be, on average, 0.7 events of that type recorded during the time frame for the readings.

NASA / CXC / CfA / STScI / Magellan / Univ. of Ariz. / ESO

X-ray observations of the Bullet Cluster provide some of the best evidence for the existence of dark matter. Click on the image to learn more.

It's possible that the three events are statistical flukes — analogous to, say, rolling three 7's in a row at a Vegas craps table. In this case, the scientists say there's a 99.8 percent chance that their results reflect a real phenomenon rather than a random crap shoot. That's significant, but it's not significant enough to claim a discovery. To make such a claim, the confidence level would have to go up to 99.9999 percent, or 5-sigma in math-geek speak.

"In medicine, you can say you are curing 99.8 percent of the cases, and that's OK. When you say you've made a fundamental discovery in high-energy physics, you can't be wrong," Mahapatra explained in a Texas A&M news release. "Given the money involved — $30 million in this case — it has to be extremely precise. With a 99.8 percent chance, that means if you repeated the same experiment a few hundred times, there is one chance it can go wrong. We want one out of a million instead."

Mahapatra said it took almost five years to notice the potential dark matter events because the CDMS team began their analysis by looking at the results from a set of germanium detectors, which are sensitive to higher masses. Another set of data was collected using silicon detectors, which are sensitive to lower masses, but those readings were put aside.

In the past few years, other dark-matter experiments began pointing to a mass range that was lower than scientists expected. "When they started seeing something significant, we thought we would look at our silicon data, which we were sitting on for more than four years," Mahapatra said.

'Hot on the trail'
Caltech theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll agreed that it was too early to declare a discovery, but said "it would not be a surprise" if the CDMS data ended up being confirmed. Other experiments, ranging from AMS to LUX to SuperCDMS to Xenon1T, will be adding to the evidence. "It is certainly a reminder that we are hot on the trail of looking for dark matter," Carroll told NBC News.

He was intrigued by the possibility that the heavier particle mass could explain why dark matter accounts for so much more of the universe than ordinary matter. "You can imagine that there is one dark matter particle for every ordinary particle," Carroll said.

Some theorists propose that ordinary matter and dark matter come into existence through a process known as cosmic cladogenesis. Mahapatra said a balance in the number of the two types of particles would fit such a hypothesis. "It's either a coincidence, or a tremendous clue," Mahapatra said.

More about dark matter:

• Dark matter hints found on space station
• How to catch dark matter
• Why dark matter matters

The report from the CDMS Collaboration, "Dark Matter Search Results Using the Silicon Detectors of CDMS II," was discussed over the weekend at the American Physical Society's April meeting in Denver and has been submitted for publication in Physical Review Letters. Mahapatra is one of 89 listed co-authors.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Matt Kapust / Sanford Laboratory

The Large Underground Xenon detector in South Dakota could find dark matter particles.

By Tia Ghose
LiveScience 

While the world's largest atom smasher was busy finding the Higgs boson — the particle thought to explain why other particles have mass — physicists have been quietly building giant laboratories deep underground.

No, scientists aren't hiding the next James Bond supervillain down there. Instead, they are working more than a mile beneath Earth's surface to find some of the universe's most elusive particles. 

The layers of rock may harbor evidence of a new force and shield delicate experiments from cosmic rays and other high-energy particles, allowing ultra-rare particles to reveal themselves. Here are some mysterious particles that could be lurking underground.

The unparticle
Physicists are hunting for a new fundamental force within Earth's mantle. The unparticle, which has some of the characteristics of massless photons as well as mass-bearing particles, could be responsible for long-range spin interactions, a new force that causes the electrons in atoms to align their spins over long distances.

To find evidence of the new force, researchers mapped out the electron density and spin within Earth's mantle and are now investigating whether these subterranean electrons are affecting how neutrons and electrons spin in two experiments separated by about 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers). If the electrons in the mantle are transmitting a force to those particles in lab experiments, it should change the frequency at which they spin. Then the new force would join gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces in dictating the behavior of the universe. [50 Amazing Facts About Planet Earth]

Dark-matter particles
The universe is filled with invisible stuff called dark matter, whose gravitational pull is thought to keep galaxies from flying apart. Leading theories propose that dark matter is made up of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, that rarely interact with ordinary matter.

Several labs, including the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Detector in Homestake, S.D., rely on Earth's crust to shield experiments from cosmic rays that could drown out the few interactions of WIMPs with regular atoms. So far, traces of WIMPs have been few and far between, but with several experiments ongoing, evidence of WIMPs could be revealed within the next few years.

Solar neutrinos
Physicists at Gran Sasso National Laboratory, a particle detector buried a mile beneath an Italian mountain, have caught solar neutrinos in the act of changing types, or “flavors.” The sun's nuclear reactions create these chargeless particles, but leading theories suggest they change flavor as they traveled to Earth. As a result, physicists looking for certain flavors of solar neutrinos have measured fewer solar neutrinos of those flavors than they expected.

Solar neutrinos rarely interact with matter, but by shooting beams of the particles 454 miles (731 kilometers) from the CERN physics lab to the underground lab in Gran Sasso, physicists managed to catch the particles in the act of changing flavor. The finding confirms that neutrinos do change flavor as they travel from the sun.

Finding geoneutrinos
Neutrinos may form at the sun, but they also are produced from radioactive elements within Earth's mantle. The Gran Sasso Lab also has isolated some of these so-called geoneutrinos, which form when radioactive uranium or thorium decays. The new particles could explain how much heat forms inside the Earth, driving the motion of tectonic plates. To catch these geoneutrinos emanating from the Earth's mantle, the researchers use an oil-based fluid that scintillates, or gives off light, when subatomic particles bump into the fluid. The researchers identified the geoneutrinos because they emit a positron followed by a neutron when bumping into the atoms of the fluid, which gives of a characteristic flash of light.

Nucleon decay
Although many subatomic particles break down into other particles, so far no one has caught the decay of protons or neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms. Nucleon decay is predicted by Grand Unified Theories that seek to explain everything in physics.

To find evidence of this rare decay, scientists at the Super-Kamiokande experiment under Mount Kamioka in Japan have spent several years hunting for nucleon decay. Even if it takes protons one hundred hundred thousand million billion trillion (or 10 raised to the 34th power) years to decay, the detectors should be able to find at least a few of these events. So far, though, Super K still hasn't found any evidence of proton decay.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

• Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings
• Gallery: Dreamy Images Reveal Beauty in Physics
• Beyond Higgs: 5 Elusive Particles That May Lurk in the Universe

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NASA file

A fish-eye view of the International Space Station from July 2011 shows the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) in the foreground. A Russian Progress cargo ship and a Soyuz crew capsule are docked on the left end of the station. The structure extending to the left of the AMS is a thermal radiator. Off to the right, the shuttle Atlantis is docked to the station's Tranquility module.

Scientists say a $2 billion antimatter-hunting experiment on the International Space Station has detected its first hints of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up almost a quarter of the universe.

The evidence from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, revealed Wednesday at Europe's CERN particle physics lab, is based on an excess in the cosmic production of anti-electrons, also known as positrons. The AMS research team can't yet rule out other explanations for the excess, but the fresh findings provide the best clues yet as to the nature of dark matter.

"Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin," Samuel Ting, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who leads the international AMS collaboration, said in a CERN news release.

The results have been published in Physical Review Letters and were discussed during a NASA news conference.

Dark matter is so named because it hasn't been detected directly through electromagnetic emissions, but primarily through its gravitational effect. Precise measurements of the movements of galaxies and galaxy clusters, as well as studies of the big bang's afterglow, indicate that it accounts for 22.7 percent of the universe's content. Another mysterious factor known as dark energy makes up 72.8 percent, leaving just 4.5 percent for ordinary matter.

Scientists have theorized that ultra-high-energy collisions involving dark matter particles could produce more positrons than expected. The best places to detect such collisions are in huge underground experiments such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider — or in outer space, where cosmic rays can be measured more easily than they are on Earth. 

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is the most sensitive cosmic-ray detector ever put into orbit. Researchers from 16 countries worked for well more than a decade to get AMS ready for the space station, but it literally took an act of Congress to get the extra money needed for the launch. The bus-sized device was brought up on the shuttle Endeavour and installed in 2011, during the shuttle fleet's second-last mission. 

Since then, readings from the AMS have been flowing in to Ting and his colleagues for analysis. CERN said the results announced on Wednesday are based on 25 billion recorded events, including 400,000 positrons with energies between 500 million electron volts and 350 billion electron volts. "This represents the largest collection of antimatter particles recorded in space," CERN said.

Researchers noticed an increase in the fraction of positrons detected in the range of 10 billion to 250 billion electron volts. They said the data showed no significant variation over time, or any preferred incoming direction. All this is consistent with the annihilation of dark matter particles in space.

CERN

This chart compares the results from AMS on positron emissions with results from other experiments. AMS measurements at different energy levels are represented by the red dots with error bars.

Other experiments have recorded similar increases in positron production, but AMS was able to chart the rise in unprecedented detail. Ting compared the resolution to seeing something with the naked eye vs. an electron microscope. "It is these fine features that are the difference between us and the rest of the experiments," he told reporters.

Further evidence is needed, however: It's possible that the bump in positrons could be created by emissions from pulsars spread across the galactic plane. The most promising hypothesis suggests that dark matter is part of a yet-to-be-detected array of "supersymmetric" particles, and if that concept is correct, researchers should see a sharp drop in the positron emissions at energies higher than 250 billion electron volts.

Ting said there's not yet enough data to render a decision about such a drop-off. "We want to know how quickly it drops off, how sharp is the drop-off," he told NBC News. "It's the way it drops off that tells you whether it's dark matter collisions, or from pulsars." 

He pointed out that the newly released findings are based on just 10 percent of the data AMS is expected to collect.

"When you take a new precision instrument into a new regime, you tend to see many new results, and we hope this this will be the first of many," Ting said. "AMS is the first experiment to measure to 1 percent accuracy in space. It is this level of precision that will allow us to tell whether our current positron observation has a dark matter or pulsar origin."

Future revelations are expected to come from AMS as well as from the Large Hadron Collider and other underground laboratories.

"The AMS result is a great example of the complementarity of experiments on Earth and in space,” CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said in Wednesday's statement. “Working in tandem, I think we can be confident of a resolution to the dark matter enigma sometime in the next few years."

Update for 4:40 p.m. ET April 3: One of the experiments that could make a direct detection of dark matter particles in the months ahead is the Large Underground Xenon Experiment. LUX is located in an old gold mine, almost a mile deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The project's scientists will keep watch for telltale interactions between dark matter and the xenon in their detector. In an emailed statement, LUX co-spokesperson Richard Gaitskell, a physicist at Brown University, hailed the AMS results but said that questions remain:

"Obviously it’s a fantastic new instrument. It’s considerably more sensitive than anything we’ve previously flown as far as looking for antiparticles. So it’s a tremendous step forward.

"The results themselves are consistent with a flux of antiparticles that come from dark matter. On the downside, no aspect of the data that’s been discussed so far allows one to differentiate between an explanation that these antiparticles are coming from dark matter or from another astrophysical source.

"What we see is that at the higher-energy regime that the detector, there is a significant increase in the positron flux. That’s interesting, but it’s been recorded by previous instruments. What we were hoping to see was some additional structure. We’d like to see a bump that has some upper energy threshold or edge, rather just a rise at higher energies. Right now, the new data from AMS does not provide a definitive indication of an upper edge. We’d like to see something like that as direct evidence of dark matter."

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden issued a statement that focusing on the roles played by the space agency and the International Space Station. " I am confident that this is only the first of many scientific discoveries enabled by the station that will change our understanding of the universe," Bolden said. "Multiple NASA human spaceflight centers around the country played important roles in this work, and we look forward to many more exciting results from AMS."

More about dark matter:

• How to catch a dark matter particle
• Dark matter finding thrown into question
• Why dark matter matters

To watch the full NASA news conference, click to the 48-minute mark in this Ustream recording.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

ESA

This all-sky map from the Planck probe charts the imprint of the big bang's cosmic afterglow.

The Planck cosmology probe has forced scientists to revise their estimates of the universe's age and the cosmic balance of matter and dark energy — and now it's led a physicist to remix the sound of the big bang as well.

The new big-bang sound was created over the weekend by John Cramer, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Washington. The audio file follows up on Cramer's decade-old audio rendition of the big bang, which was based on data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP.

Planck and WMAP both charted subtle variations in the all-sky cosmic microwave background, a super-faint glow of stretched-out radiation from a time when the universe was 380,000 years old. The variations amount to mere millionths of a degree in temperature, but they record the imprint of fluctuations left behind by the big bang.

Cramer released his original WMAP big-bang sound 10 years ago, but the Planck readings were so much better that a remix was in order.

"The new frequency spectrum goes to much higher frequencies than did the WMAP analysis, and therefore offers a more 'high-fidelity' rendition of the Sound of the Big Bang," Cramer explained on a Web page providing the updated sound files. We're featuring the 20-second version, but you can download versions that play out for as long as 500 seconds.

"I recommend the 100-second version, but you can choose for yourself," Cramer said.

The sound follows the curves in Planck data to reflect the propagation of pressure waves through the medium of the early universe during the first 760,000 years of its evolution. The time scale has been speeded up astronomically, of course, and Cramer figures that the frequency has been scaled up by a factor of 100 septillion (that's a 1 followed by 26 zeroes).

"The actual Big Bang frequencies, which had wavelengths on the order of a fraction of the size of the universe, were far too low to be heard by humans (even had any been around)," Cramer explained.

Ten years ago, Cramer said that when he played the sound of the WMAP data on his computer, his dogs pricked up their ears and listened attentively. "There was less reaction from the dogs this time, but there was some barking when the big bang sound initially came on," Cramer told NBC News in an email.

Sharp-eared listeners with a good sound system will notice that the Planck remix doesn't rattle the speakers as much as the WMAP original does. "The big bang sound is different because of the higher frequency components from Planck, and because I decided to shift the frequency scale factor to make less bass (since not everyone has a sub-woofer on their PC)," Cramer said.

In addition to the big-bang sound, Cramer has several unorthodox claims to scientific fame, including his long-running column for Analog magazine; his science-fiction novels, "Twistor" and "Einstein's Bridge"; and his experiment to find out whether quantum mechanics would allow for backward causality.

Cramer said his retrocausality experiment is currently in limbo. He has always said that there might be some subtle quantum effect that would rule out backward causality, and so far that's been the case.

"The Mark II version of the retrocausality experiment has concluded for now, defeated by detector noise," he said in his email. "I'm currently in the process of writing a new pre-proposal (to a government organization I won't name) seeking funding for a Mark III version of the experiment.  It would use noise-free superconducting-transition single photon detectors instead of the too-noisy avalanche photodiodes, would be down-scaled in wavelength a bit so that the entangled photon pairs would be at wavelengths matching the communication industry standard wavelengths for fiber optics, and would use two switched single-mode fiber optic Mach-Zehnder interferometers instead of lenses, prisms and mirrors on an optics table.  Said organization is interested because there is the possibility of zero-time-delay communication with distant space missions."

Read that last sentence again: Someone in the government is interested in zero-time-delay communication with distant space missions. Albert Einstein's theories suggest that information can't be transmitted any faster than the speed of light, but Einstein himself said quantum mechanics might open the door for "spooky action at a distance." Zero-time-delay communication certainly sounds spooky — but is it possible? Stay tuned.

Scott Eklund / Seattle P-I file

University of Washington physicist John Cramer, seen here in a 2007 photo, has been working on a laser experiment to test whether causality can work backward in time.

More weird physics:

• Math twisted for faster-than-light travel
• Bizarre quantum physics may play role in life
• New view: Big bang was a big crystallization

Audio clips: Copyright 2013 John G. Cramer.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

ESA

The Planck mission has produced the most detailed all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The European-led team behind the Planck cosmology probe on Thursday released the mission's first all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background — a post-big-bang "baby picture" that suggests our universe is about 100 million years older than scientists thought.

The map traces subtle fluctuations in temperature that were imprinted on the deep sky when the cosmos was just 370,000 years old. Scientists say the imprint reflects ripples that arose as early as the first nonillionth of a second of the universe's existence. These ripples are thought to have given rise to today's vast cosmic web of galaxy clusters and dark matter.

"To a cosmologist, this map is a gold mine of information," University of Cambridge astrophysicist George Efstathiou, a member of the Planck science team, said during a European Space Agency news conference in Paris. He joked that not long ago, cosmologists might have "given up their children" to have such a map in their hands.

The $900 million (€700 million) Planck probe was launched on a European Ariane 5 rocket in 2009, along with the infrared-sensitive Herschel space telescope. Planck produced its first all-sky radiation map in 2010. Since then, scientists have fine-tuned the image to remove the bright emissions from the Milky Way and other foreground sources, leaving only the background radiation.

Two NASA satellites — the Cosmic Background Explorer and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, also known as COBE and WMAP — produced earlier versions of the baby picture. Those findings determined that the universe is made up of 4.5 percent ordinary matter, 22.7 percent dark matter, and 72.8 percent dark energy. The results also showed that the universe is geometrically "flat" to a margin of error of 0.4 percent, and helped scientists estimate the universe's age at 13.7 billion years.

NASA

Planck's map of the cosmic microwave background has significantly higher resolution than the readings that were made during previous missions such as COBE and WMAP, as shown in this graphic.

Planck can produce cosmological maps with three times the resolution of WMAP, and at least 10 times the temperature sensitivity. As a result, the estimates of the universe's age and composition have undergone some additional fine tuning. Planck's readings indicate that the universe's expansion rate is slower than previously thought — which means the universe is older.

Planck's estimate for the age of the universe is 13.82 billion years.

Martin White, a member of the Planck team from the University of California at Berkeley, told NBC News that Planck's estimate narrowed down the error bars on previous estimates. "In that sense, it's very consistent, but much more precise," he said.

The Planck team's breakdown of the universe's constituents is 4.9 percent ordinary matter, 26.8 percent dark matter and 68.3 percent dark energy, he said. "There's less stuff that we don't understand, by a tiny amount," Efstathiou said. As a result of the shift toward more matter and less dark energy, "an awful lot of people are going to be revising their calculations," White said.

Efstathiou said the Planck data also pointed to some "strange features" in the cosmic microwave background that may point to new frontiers in physics, including an unexplained dip at one point of the power spectrum, and an unusual distribution of large-scale fluctuations that roughly followed the plane of the solar system.

"Why characteristics of the CMB should relate to our solar system is not understood. ... I was explicitly told not to say anything about God in this talk — which I've just violated," Efstathiou said half-jokingly.

ESA

This graphic highlights anomalies seen in the Planck data. One anomaly is an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky (indicated by the curved line), with slightly higher average temperatures in the southern ecliptic hemisphere and slightly lower average temperatures in the northern ecliptic hemisphere. This runs counter to the mainstream view that the universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look. There is also a cold spot that extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected (circled). The anomalous regions have been enhanced here to make them more clearly visible.

Planck's data set should help scientists do a reality check on many of the hypotheses proposed by cosmologists, including the view that the universe underwent rapid and far-reaching inflation in the first moments of its existence, as well as the claim that there are six or seven spatial dimensions in addition to the three we perceive.

An initial reading of the data appears to favor the simple models for the inflationary big bang, and rule out a lot of the complex models. "We think that they will be facing a dead end," said Krzysztof Gorski, a member of the Planck team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain noted that so far, the mission has delivered just half of the data it's expected to produce. The rest of the data is scheduled to come out in 2014 and 2015. "Today is not the end of the story," he told reporters. Efstathiou put it another way, paraphrasing one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's best-known catchphrases: "We'll be back."

More about cosmology:

• WMAP scientists unveil their best 'baby picture'
• Japanese string theorists simulate big bang
• Scrunched-up dimensions untangled

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:49 AM EDT

Like many sports fans across the country, five groups of physicists at the University of Maryland are filling out their brackets to predict the winners and losers in the NCAA men's basketball tournament. While most people use a strategy to guide their picks — such as relying on advanced basketball knowledge or identifying the cutest mascot — this Maryland method relies on quantum physics.

David Hucul, a graduate student, came up with the idea. Last year, his quantum picks performed surprisingly well against picks from other people in the laboratory.

"It almost won," Susan Clark, a post-doctoral researcher who works with Hucul. "It was kind of scary."

Both Hucul and Clark work in the lab of Chris Monroe, usually on problems related to quantum computing and building quantum networks. They use ions of the element ytterbium, a metal that's smack dab in the middle of the periodic table. Everyday research in the lab is dedicated to making connections between submicroscopic objects, across distances much longer than typical quantum interactions, such as a few yards instead of smaller than an atom.

When used to assist in picking basketball games, the team uses a phenomenon called superposition. They coax the ytterbium ion to act a bit like a coin. In the same way that flipping a fair coin yields a random result of heads or tails, superposition allows the physicists to prepare the ion to have a 50-50 chance of ending up in state A or state B. It's possible that, based on the way a coin is flipped, the result isn't always truly random. But by using quantum phenomena, in which the location or state of an object is based on probability, the result is truly random.

Ion picks the Panthers
Hucul and Clark create an ion that is simultaneously in those two states. They assign one state to each basketball team, and then record the ion's verdict for each game of the tournament. The ion's picks suggested that the University of Pittsburgh, the No. 8 seed in the West Region, will win this year's tournament. The New York Times' Nate Silver pegged the Panthers' chances of winning the whole thing at about 0.8 percent — making them about the 13th most likely champ, his analysis indicated.

The trouble with the ion technique, if you want to have the best chance of predicting the winner of the tournament, is that in many games the two competing teams do not really have an equal chance of winning.

However, research also shows that people — even knowledgeable basketball fans — are not very good at predicting the real result of the tournament. A 2010 study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology showed that sometimes the best bet is always to pick the higher seed, because even though upsets will occur, picking the right one is difficult.

Speaking of difficult, the odds of generating a perfect bracket for all 63 contests that kick-off with Thursday's games is astronomical. If the predictions of game winners were based on coin flips, the odds of a perfectly correct bracket are one in over 9 quintillion — that's the number 9 followed by 18 zeroes — said Jeff Bergen, a mathematician at DePaul University in Chicago.

Odds of a perfect bracket
Bergen also projected how likely it is that someone who knows a bit about basketball would generate a perfect bracket. By estimating the probabilities that No. 1 seeds beat No. 16 seeds, and No. 2 seeds beat No. 15 seeds, and so on, he found that there's a roughly 1-in-17,000 chance of predicting a perfect first round of the tournament. With a couple of additional assumptions, he made the rough calculation that for an entire tournament, about one out of 128 billion brackets would be perfect.

"Certainly, one could make different assumptions, but the 128 billion is not a bad approximation," said Bergen.

That means that if each person in the U.S. knew a bit about basketball and filled in a bracket, there's about a 1-in-400 chance that one person would pick every game correctly.

The physicists might be able to simulate this. Clark said they could weight the ion's choice by creating an "unequal superposition," which would allow them to create a probability unequal to 50-50. In this way, they might be able to account for the type of basketball knowledge Bergen referred to, and reduce the odds of the ion producing a perfect bracket.

More about bracketology:

• Final Four possibilities for 2013
• A dummy's guide to filling out your bracket

Chris Gorski is a writer and editor for Inside Science News Service. This report was originally published on Inside Science as "A Quantum Leap for Basketball Bracketology." Copyright 2013 American Institute of Physics. Reprinted with permission.

A newfound particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is indeed a Higgs boson, which is thought to play a role in how other subatomic particles get their mass, scientists reported Thursday at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.

Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that could be the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle," to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.

But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is "a Higgs boson." But they can't yet rule out the possibility that other Higgs bosons exist as well. [In Photos: Searching for the Higgs Boson]

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela said in a statement.

ATLAS spokesperson Dave Charlton agreed, saying that the new results "point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model." In particle physics, "spin" refers to a quantum property of elementary particles and not to actual physical rotation.

To confirm the particle as having the characteristics of a Higgs boson, physicists needed to collect tons of data that would reveal its quantum properties as well as how it interacted with other particles. For instance, a Higgs particle should have no spin, and its parity, or the measure of how its mirror image behaves, should be positive, both of which were supported by data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

The scientists are not sure whether this Higgs boson is the single particle predicted by the Standard Model or perhaps the lightest of several bosons predicted to exist by other theories.

Seeing how this particle decays into other particles could let physicists know whether this Higgs is the "plain vanilla" Standard Model Higgs. Detecting a Higgs boson is rare, with just one observed for every 1 trillion proton-proton collisions. As such, the LHC physicists say they need much more data to understand all of the ways in which the Higgs decays.

From what is known about the particle now, physicists have said the Higgs boson may spell the universe's doom in the very far future. That's because the mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the future of space and time. Its mass of 126 times the mass of the proton is just about what would be needed to create a marginally stable universe that could blink out of existence in a cataclysm billions of years from now.

"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

• Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson
• Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature
• Photos: The World's Largest Atom Smasher (LHC)

This report was updated by NBC News.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

CMS Collaboration / CERN

This proton-proton collision, recorded with the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid last year, shows the characteristics expected from the decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson to a pair of Z bosons. One of the Z particles subsequently decays to a pair of electrons (green lines and green towers), and the other Z decays to a pair of muons (red lines). The event could also be due to known Standard Model background processes

The subatomic particle discovered last year at Europe's Large Hadron Collider is looking more and more like the fabled Higgs boson, the one fundamental piece that's been missing from the theory that governs particle physics. But at a widely anticipated conference in Italy, physicists said they can't yet confirm 100 percent that this is the particle they're looking for.

Ever since the "Higgs-like particle" was detected, researchers at the LHC have been trying to determine whether this is the one true Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model, or whether it's just one of several subatomic particles that play a role in imparting mass to other particles. There's even a chance that this particular particle something completely different, possibly linked to the way gravity works, said James Gillies, a spokesman for the CERN particle physics center on the French-Swiss border.

CERN is the international organization in charge of operating the world's biggest and costliest particle accelerator.

The key to confirming the particle's status is to determine a property known as spin, CERN says. If the new particle is spin-zero, then it's a Higgs boson. If it's spin-two, it's something else. The latest results, presented at the annual Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, can't yet rule out a spin-two particle, CERN said.

"Until we can confidently tie down the particle's spin, the particle will remain Higgs-like," CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci said in a statement on Wednesday. "Only when we know that is has spin-zero will we be able to call it a Higgs."

Physicists will continue to analyze the data collected at the LHC over the past couple of years, and there's a good chance they'll come up with the confirmation in the months ahead — even though the collider was shut down last month for an upgrade that's expected to require two years of work. That's not guaranteed, however. Raymond Volkas, a physicist from Australia's University of Melbourne, told New Scientist that Higgs-watchers might have to prepare themselves for the possibility that the LHC will never fully confirm the mystery particle to be the Standard Model Higgs.

Last year, scientists were intrigued by an extra "peak" in the data from ATLAS, one of the LHC's main detectors. Some wondered whether that hinted at the existence of two Higgs bosons instead of just one. But now that more readings have been added to the analysis, the anomalous peak is fading.

"When we first saw this excess a year ago, we were excited that it may be real physics and we hoped that by this time we would have a truly significant effect," the ViXra Log's Philip Gibbs writes. "This has not happened."

Gibbs said that yet-to-be-released findings are said to throw even more cold water on the two-boson hypothesis. "This means that expectations of significant BSM [beyond Standard Model] effects from run 1 are now lower," he wrote.

Update for 4 p.m. ET: The consensus appears to be that the results presented at the Moriond conference firm up the Standard Model's view of the subatomic world — which is a bit of a disappointment for those hoping to see clear signs of new physics. "It may well be a 'vanilla Higgs,' though there are still hints of unseen sprinkles," Robert Garisto, editor of the Physical Review Letters, joked in a Twitter update.

"Vanilla" was also the word used by Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll in his Twitter assessment, although Harvard's Lisa Randall replied that there was still a chance of getting "vanilla swirl." On his "Not Even Wrong" blog, Columbia mathematician Peter Woit says it's looking like a "garden-variety [Standard Model] Higgs, which is discouraging for hopes of hints about how to get beyond the Standard Model."

The headline on Wired's report pretty much sums up the mood: "This Just In: Higgs Boson Still Boring."

More about the Higgs boson:

• Physicists to share latest word about Higgs quest
• Higgs-like particle may foretell end of universe
• Special report on the Large Hadron Collider

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

CERN / CMS

A computer visualization shows proton-proton collision events at the Large Hadron Collider that would be consistent with the behavior of the long-sought Higgs boson.

By Clara Moskowitz
LiveScience

The latest news on a newfound particle that turned up last year at the world's largest particle accelerator will be announced at a conference beginning Saturday in Italy.

The big question on scientists' mind is whether the particle truly is the long-sought Higgs boson, which has been predicted for decades but never seen ... until perhaps now.

The teams behind the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN physics lab near Geneva, where the new particle was found, will present their analyses of the full set of data collected in 2012. The gathering, called the Moriond conference, runs from March 2 through 16 in La Thuile, Italy.

The researchers announced their find in July 2012, and have been studying the particle's properties ever since in hopes of confirming it is in fact the Higgs. [Gallery: Search for the Higgs Boson]

"Patience is the order of the day,” CERN’s research director, Sergio Bertolucci, said in a statement. "Everyone wants to know exactly what it is we've discovered, and that will come through a long and painstaking analysis. But the Higgs is just one part of a wide research program at the LHC experiments, and there will be plenty of other interesting physics at Moriond."

The Higgs boson has been the missing piece of the Standard Model, which describes all the known subatomic particles in the universe. Theorized by physicist Peter Higgs and his colleagues in 1964, the particle is thought to be tied to a Higgs field that bestows mass on other particles.

Researchers caution that the final word on the Higgs is unlikely to be handed down in the coming week.

"Many people were hoping CMS and ATLAS, the two large multipurpose experiments operating at the LHC at CERN, would finally announce that the boson discovered last year is really a Higgs boson," LHC physicist Pauline Gagnon wrote on the physics blog Quantum Diaries. "Unfortunately, it is still too early to say. Nevertheless, both experiments can be expected to show interesting updates on the new boson mass measurement, decay rates and spin, all of which will provide a clearer picture."

To determine if the new particle is actually the Higgs, scientists must study how it decays. The particle is exotic and short-lived, and almost immediately after being conjured in the accelerator, it decays into other, more mundane particle species. By studying the rates and patterns of these decays, the physicists hope to show that the new particle fits the properties predicted for the Higgs.

The findings being presented at the conference include more precise measurements of these decays, which could be the key to confirming the particle's identity.

"Precise measurements may not at first sight seem as exciting as discovering a new particle," Bertolucci said, "but it’s there that we really learn things. For example, a discrepancy with theoretical predictions for the signal strengths in any of the decay channels would be one of the strongest markers for new physics."

Gagnon said she looked forward to learning whether the new particle decays in patterns that deviate from what is predicted by the Standard Model. If so, it could point to other new particles joining the mix, such as those predicted by a theory called supersymmetry.

"Both ATLAS and CMS obtained sometimes more, sometimes less events containing the new boson than what is expected from the Standard Model, although these observations came with very large errors," Gagnon wrote. "An excess of events in the two-photon decay rate could indicate that new particles contribute to the process, a possibility that many theorists hope would reveal the presence of supersymmetry."

Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

• Why the Higgs Boson May Seal Fate of the Universe
• Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson
• Higgs Boson: Mysterious Particle Could Help Unlock Secrets of the Universe | Video

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