That Computer Actually Got an F on the Turing Test

Over the weekend, a group of programmers claimed they built a program that passed the famous Turing Test, in which a computer tries to trick judges into believing that it is a human. According to news reports, this is a historic accomplishment. But is it really? And what does it mean for artificial intelligence?

The Turing Test has long been held as a landmark in machine learning. Its creator, British computer scientist Alan Turing, thought it would represent a point when computers would have brains nearly as capable as our own. But the value of the Turing Test in modern day computer science is questionable. And the actual accomplishments of the test-winning chatbot are not all that impressive.

The Turing Test 2014 competition was organized to mark the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death and included several celebrity judges, including actor Robert Llewellyn of the British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. The winner was a program named Eugene Goostman, which managed to convince 10 out of 30 judges that it was a real boy. Goostman is the work of computer engineering team led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko.

The program had a few built-in advantages, such as the fact that he was claimed to be a 13-year-old non-native English speaker from Ukraine. It also only tricked the judges about 30 percent of the time (an F minus, or so). For many artificial intelligence experts, this is less than exciting.

“There’s nothing in this example to be impressed by,” wrote computational cognitive scientist Joshua Tenenbaum of MIT in an email. He added that “it’s not clear that to meet that criterion you have to produce something better than a good chatbot, and have a little luck or other incidental factors on your side.”

Screenshots on the BBC’s article about the win show a transcript that doesn’t read like much more than a random sentence generator. When WIRED chatted with Goostman through his programmers’ Princeton website, the results felt something like an AIM chatbot circa 1999.

WIRED: Where are you from?
Goostman: A big Ukrainian city called Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea

WIRED: Oh, I’m from the Ukraine. Have you ever been there?
Goostman: ukraine? I’ve never there. But I do suspect that these crappy robots from the Great Robots Cabal will try to defeat this nice place too.

The version on the website could of course be a different version than was used during the competition.

This particular chatbox almost passed a version of the Turing test two years ago, fooling judges approximately 29 percent of the time.

Fooling around 30 percent of the judges also doesn’t seem like a particularly high bar. While the group claims that no previous computer program has been able to reach this level, there have been numerous chatbots, some as far back as the 1960s, which were able to fool people for at least a short while. In a 1991 competition, a bot called PC Therapist was able to get five out of 10 judges to believe it was human. More recently, there have been fears that online chatbots could trick people into falling in love with them, stealing their personal information in the process. And a 2011 demonstration had a program named Cleverbot manage a Turing Test pass rate of nearly 60 percent.

So where does this 30 percent criterion stem from? It seems to be a particular interpretation of Alan Turing’s 1950 paper where he described his eponymous test.

“I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible, to programme computers… to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning,” wrote Turing (.pdf).

So the father of the Turing test wasn’t using this as some threshold for intelligence, he was simply stating his prediction of where he thought computers would be five decades in the future.

For most modern-day artificial intelligence experts, the Turing Test has long since been superseded by other accomplishments. It’s not entirely surprising that a 65-year-old test doesn’t hold up, given the lack of data about intelligence — both human and artificial — available at the dawn of the computer age. Today, we have programs that show quite interesting intelligent-like behavior, such as Netflix’s suggestion algorithm, Google’s self-driving car, or Apple’s Siri personal assistant. These are all tailored to specific tasks. What Alan Turing had envisioned was a machine that was generally intelligent; it could just as easily organize your schedule as learn Latin.

Read more at Wired Science

3000-Year-Old Remains of Baby Found at Halloween's Birthplace

Remains of a baby dating back to 3,000 years ago have been found at a site in Ireland that is believed to be the birthplace of Halloween.

The fully intact skeleton, possibly belonging to a 7-10 month child, was unearthed during a three week excavation at Tlachtga, on the Hill of Ward near Athboy Co. Meath.

One of Ireland’s most enigmatic sites, the Hill of Tlachtga features impressive circular earthworks which are best seen from the air. Medieval texts link the site to Samhain, the ancient Celtic Festival which is the precursor to modern Halloween.

“We may never know what caused the death of the child. The skeleton probably dates back 3,000 years and was found on the bedrock at the base of a 1.5m (3-foot, 28-inch) ditch,” lead archaeologist Stephen Davis, at University College Dublin, told the Irish Examiner.

Excavation and surveys carried out using airborne laser revealed the area was a “key ritual site.”

“The site has several different phases of monumental enclosures and we believe them to be associated with festivals and rituals potentially dating back as far as 1,000 B.C.,” Davis said.

Sitting on top of the Hill of Ward, Tlachtga is a site steeped in folklore. According to Irish mythology, it got its name from the daughter of the powerful druid Mug Ruith. According to legend, the remains of the druidess, who is said to have died on the hill after giving birth to triplets, are buried there.

Tlachtga is also believed to be the site of the Great Fire Festival in which sacrifices were offered to gods on Samhain eve. All hearth fires throughout Ireland were extinguished and then lit again from a central fire on the hill.

Meaning summer’s end, Samhain was a great festival of the dead — a time when the doorways to the otherworld opened and journeys could be made from one side to the other.

The veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was believed to be the thinnest on Oct. 31, a day which lies exactly between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice.

The excavation revealed the monument of Tlachtga is actually the last of at least three phases of enclosure on the hill.

“As a working model for the phases of construction, at least one small enclosure, about 15 inches in diameter, was enclosed by a very large, tri- or quadrivallate enclosure, about 650 feet in diameter, which was replaced by the monument we see today,” the archaeologists said.

Read more at Discovery News

Mystery Sea Stars 'Goo' Disease Spreads to Oregon

A mysterious disease that is turning sea stars to goo has taken off along the Oregon coast, with up to half or more of the creatures being infected in just the last few weeks, scientists say.

Until now, Oregon was the one state along the U.S. West Coast essentially spared from the disease. In April, researchers estimated less than 1 percent or so of the purple ochre sea stars (Pisaster ochraceus) living within 10 sites along Oregon's intertidal zones — which provide an easily accessible place to monitor sea stars — were affected by the wasting disease. By mid-May that percentage had gone up slightly, and then after that it seemed to skyrocket.

"The percentages we saw last week, they were as high as 40 to 60 percent of the population that's showing signs of wasting," said Bruce Menge, a marine biologist at Oregon State University, who is studying the wasting disease in Oregon.

Turning sea stars to goo

Sea star wasting syndrome causes a sea star's body to disintegrate, ultimately leading to death.

The disease tends to progress from no outward signs to behavior changes in which the sea stars cross their arms and seem to collapse on themselves. Then white lesions appear on the surface of the sea star's body that turn into holes; those lesions are typically followed by the disintegration of skin around the lesion and the loss of a limb or several limbs, and in extreme cases the animal's entire body is affected by the syndrome. Some of the creatures physically tear their bodies apart in the process, scientists say.

"We've seen a number of cases where all that's left is a puddle of their skeletal parts and a bunch of bacteria eating away at the tissue," Menge told Live Science. "It's a pretty gruesome thing to see."

The current outbreak of sea star wasting syndrome was first reported in June 2013 along the coast of Washington by researchers from Olympic National Park. Since that report, die-offs have been documented everywhere from California to Alaska and even along the East Coast from Maine through New Jersey.

"Wasting has been known for a long time, but usually it's very localized to a single site or single region," Menge said. When that's the case, as it was last August just north of Vancouver, British Columbia, the chances for recovery are high since the plankton, or floating forms, of the sea stars from healthy, nearby populations can recolonize those areas that were hit.

"The thing that is worrisome now is that it's happening pretty much all along the West Coast, even up into Alaska," Menge said.

In this widespread outbreak, Oregon seemed to be a lucky outlier. "We were hoping that for some weird reason we were going to miss out on it. We were optimistic," Menge said. "It finally did hit, and we really have no idea what the pathogen is, what the mode of transmission is. "

Mystery disease

The cause of the wasting disease is unknown, though scientists working on the mystery are testing whether an underlying virus or bacteria is to blame, along with some environmental stress, such as water temperature or salt content, making the organisms more vulnerable to it.

"We are finding correlations between certain microorganisms and viruses present in the lesions," Gary Wessel, of Brown University in Rhode Island, told Live Science in an email. "We are now testing whether these organisms are causative (by infecting healthy animals and seeing if they replicate the wasting phenotype) or just associated."

Wessel added that his lab is also looking into the impacts of environmental stressors.

"In our challenge experiments to test infectivity, we are stressing the animals with salt conditions and temperature to determine if this environmental stress makes them more susceptible," Wessel said.

Since sea stars can act as keystone predators, meaning their predatory activities shape an ecosystem, their loss could have far-reaching impacts, the researchers say. By eating mussels on the low shores in Oregon, sea stars keep those populations in check so the bivalves don't explode in numbers, at the expense of other organisms. Menge said it's too early to say whether the sea stars' mussel-munching could be compensated by whelks in the area.

Read more at Discovery News

Violent Moon-Forming Impact Occurred 60 Million Years Earlier

Through the analysis of isotopes trapped inside ancient quartz crystals, geochemists have realized that the Earth-shattering cosmic impact that laid waste to our young Earth and formed the moon happened 60 million years earlier than thought.

Speaking today (Tuesday) at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Sacramento, Calif., researchers from the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France, discussed their analysis of xenon gas isotopes trapped inside South African and Australian quartz. These geological “time capsules” were formed on the primordial Earth 3.4 and 2.7 billion years ago, respectively.

The key problem with dating the early evolution of our planet is the lack of “classical geology” that we can tap into. This means that there is very little pristine material or layers of rock that has remained unchanged for billions of years. So geochemists have stepped in to use the technique of isotopic analysis to gauge the chemical conditions of early Earth.

During the formation of ancient quartz, pockets of atmospheric gases were trapped inside, freezing a chemical fingerprint of the early atmospheric conditions. By looking at the ancient ratios of xenon isotopes and comparing them with today’s, geochemists Guillaume Avice and Bernard Marty were able to precisely zero-in on the cataclysmic Earth impact that eventually formed the moon.

In the solar system’s early history, planetary collisions were common and approximately 4.5 billion years ago the Earth was hit by a hypothetical Mars-sized object — nicknamed “Theia” — unleashing huge quantities of energy, turning the planet into a searing globe of magma. The ejecta from this impact formed the moon, although the exact formation processes are not fully understood.

But through the analysis of xenon, at least we can now define when the impact occurred.

“It is not possible to give an exact date for the formation of the Earth,” said Avice in a press release. “What this work does is to show that the Earth is older than we thought, by around 60 million years.

“The composition of the gases we are looking at changes according the conditions they are found in, which of course depend on the major events in Earth’s history. The gas sealed in these quartz samples has been handed down to us in a sort of ‘time capsule.’ We are using standard methods to compute the age of the Earth, but having access to these ancient samples gives us new data, and allows us to refine the measurement.”

It was thought that the Earth’s atmosphere formed around 100 million years after the formation of the solar system. However, the primordial atmosphere would not have survived the massive Theia impact event. By studying the xenon isotope ratios from 3.4 and 2.7 billion years ago and comparing those ratios with modern Earth, Avice and Marty have been able to look back in time to find that the Earth’s atmosphere likely started to form only 40 million years after the solar system’s formation, meaning the Theia impact occurred approximately 60 million years earlier than previous estimates.

Read more at Discovery News

Turing Test success marks milestone in computing history

An historic milestone in artificial intelligence set by Alan Turing -- the father of modern computer science -- has been achieved at an event organised by the University of Reading.

The 65 year-old iconic Turing Test was passed for the very first time by supercomputer Eugene Goostman during Turing Test 2014 held at the renowned Royal Society in London on Saturday.

'Eugene', a computer programme that simulates a 13 year old boy, was developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The development team includes Eugene's creator Vladimir Veselov, who was born in Russia and now lives in the United States, and Ukrainian born Eugene Demchenko who now lives in Russia.

The Turing Test is based on 20th century mathematician and code-breaker Turing's 1950 famous question and answer game, 'Can Machines Think?'. The experiment investigates whether people can detect if they are talking to machines or humans. The event is particularly poignant as it took place on the 60th anniversary of Turing's death, nearly six months after he was given a posthumous royal pardon.

If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. No computer has ever achieved this, until now. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it was human.

This historic event was organised by the University's School of Systems Engineering in partnership with RoboLaw, an EU-funded organisation examining the regulation of emerging robotic technologies.

Professor Kevin Warwick, a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at Coventry University, said: "In the field of Artificial Intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test, when a computer convinces a sufficient number of interrogators into believing that it is not a machine but rather is a human. It is fitting that such an important landmark has been reached at the Royal Society in London, the home of British Science and the scene of many great advances in human understanding over the centuries. This milestone will go down in history as one of the most exciting.

"Some will claim that the Test has already been passed. The words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions around the world. However this event involved the most simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially, the conversations were unrestricted. A true Turing Test does not set the questions or topics prior to the conversations. We are therefore proud to declare that Alan Turing's Test was passed for the first time on Saturday.

"Of course the Test has implications for society today. Having a computer that can trick a human into thinking that someone, or even something, is a person we trust is a wake-up call to cybercrime. The Turing Test is a vital tool for combatting that threat. It is important to understand more fully how online, real-time communication of this type can influence an individual human in such a way that they are fooled into believing something is true...when in fact it is not."

Eugene was one of five supercomputers battling it for the Turing Test 2014 Prize. On winning the competition and achieving this historic milestone Vladimir Veselov said:

"I want to congratulate everyone who worked on Eugene Goostman. Our whole team is very excited with this result. It's a remarkable achievement for us and we hope it boosts interest in artificial intelligence and chatbots. Special thanks to Professor Kevin Warwick and Dr Huma Shah for their effort in organising the event.

"Eugene was 'born' in 2001. Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn't know everything. We spent a lot of time developing a character with a believable personality. This year we improved the 'dialog controller' which makes the conversation far more human-like when compared to programs that just answer questions. Going forward we plan to make Eugene smarter and continue working on improving what we refer to as 'conversation logic'."

Read more at Science Daily

Milky Way may bear 100 million life-giving planets

There are some 100 million other places in the Milky Way galaxy that could support complex life, report a group of university astronomers in the journal Challenges. They have developed a new computation method to examine data from planets orbiting other stars in the universe.

Their study provides the first quantitative estimate of the number of worlds in our galaxy that could harbor life above the microbial level.

"This study does not indicate that complex life exists on that many planets. We're saying that there are planetary conditions that could support it. Origin of life questions are not addressed -- only the conditions to support life," according to the paper's authors Alberto Fairén, Cornell research associate; Louis Irwin, University of Texas at El Paso (lead author); Abel Méndez, University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo; and Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Washington State University.

"Complex life doesn't mean intelligent life -- though it doesn't rule it out or even animal life -- but simply that organisms larger and more complex than microbes could exist in a number of different forms. For example, organisms that form stable food webs like those found in ecosystems on Earth," the researchers explain in an auxiliary statement.

The scientists surveyed more than 1,000 planets and used a formula that considers planet density, temperature, substrate (liquid, solid or gas), chemistry, distance from its central star and age. From this information, they developed and computed the Biological Complexity Index (BCI).

The BCI calculation revealed that 1 to 2 percent of the planets showed a BCI rating higher than Europa, a moon of Jupiter thought to have a subsurface global ocean that may harbor forms of life. With about 10 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, the BCI yields 100 million plausible planets.

Despite the large number of planets that could harbor complex life, the Milky Way is so vast that planets with high BCI values are very far apart, according to the scientists. One of the closest and most promising extrasolar systems, called Gliese 581, has two planets with the apparent, possible capacity to host complex biospheres. The distance from Earth to Gliese 581 is about 20 light years.

Read more at Science Daily

'Virgin Earth' Rock Survived Massive Cosmic Collision

Billions of years ago, our baby planet was smashed by another planetary body, turning it into a burning ball of molten rock. But according isotopes recovered from deep inside the Earth’s mantle, some of the pre-impact material persists to this day, possibly proving that some of our planet survived the cosmic collision intact.

During that epoch of our solar system’s evolution, planetary collisions were commonplace and it is thought that a hypothetical Mars-sized body, nicknamed “Theia,” hit Earth in a cataclysmic collision some 4.5 billion years ago. The energies released during impact would have totally transformed our planet, obliterating its surface and melting its rocky mantle.

But the extent of this planetary transformation isn’t well understood. Was Earth completed melted? Or have some pockets of material of a primordial Earth persisted to modern day, proving that not all terrestrial material was affected by the Earth-Theia encounter?

“The energy released by the impact between the Earth and Theia would have been huge, certainly enough to melt the whole planet,” said geochemist Sujoy Mukhopadhyay of Harvard University and lead scientists of this research. “But we believe that the impact energy was not evenly distributed throughout the ancient Earth. This means that a major part of the impacted hemisphere would probably have been completely vaporized, but the opposite hemisphere would have been partly shielded, and would not have undergone complete melting.”

Mukhopadhyay is presenting his team’s work at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Sacramento, Calif., this week.

The research focuses on the comparison of noble gas isotopes in the deep mantle compared with the shallow mantle. The Earth’s mantle is a silicate rocky shell that extends from the crust to as deep as 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) to the Earth’s molten outer core. The mantle is differentiated into different mineral layers that provide information about our planet’s ancient geochemical past.

The researchers analyzed ratios of isotopes of Helium (3He) and Neon (22Ne) and found that the ratio was significantly higher in the shallow mantle than it was in the deep mantle. “This implies that the last giant impact did not completely mix the mantle and there was not a whole mantle magma ocean,” said Mukhopadhyay in a press release.

In addition, they analyzed the 129-Xenon to 130-Xenon ratio from material transported from the deep mantle to the surface by mantle plumes — again, the ratio was significantly lower in material from the lower mantle when compared to ratios found at the surface. The Xenon ratio is interesting as 129-Xenon is produced by the radioactive decay of 129-Iodine, putting a definite ‘time stamp’ on the transported deep mantle material to within the first 100 million years of Earth’s early history.

“The geochemistry indicates that there are differences between the noble gas isotope ratios in different parts of the Earth, and these need to be explained,” said Mukhopadhyay. “The idea that a very disruptive collision of the Earth with another planet-sized body, the biggest event in Earth’s geological history, did not completely melt and homogenize the Earth challenges some of our notions on planet formation and the energetics of giant impacts.

“If the theory is proven correct, then we may be seeing echoes of the ancient Earth, from a time before the collision.”

In other research published in the journal Science last week, isotopic analysis of elements inside moon rock (rock recovered by the Apollo missions from the lunar surface and moon meteorites recovered on Earth) revealed the chemical signature for Theia and geologists have been able to deduce that around 50 percent of the moon is likely composed of material originating from the interplanetary impactor.

Read more at Discovery News

Human Face Evolved to Withstand Punches

Human facial structure evolved to tolerate punches to the head, according to new research that suggests our ancestors spent a lot of time fighting.

The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Biological Reviews, presents an alternative to the long-held theory that human faces look the way they do primarily because of a past evolved need among our ancestors to chew hard foods, like nuts.

Such ancestors likely included the australopiths, which lived 4 to 2 million years ago in Africa.

"The australopiths were characterized by a suite of traits that may have improved fighting ability, including hand proportions that allow formation of a fist; effectively turning the delicate musculoskeletal system of the hand into a club effective for striking," David Carrier, lead author of the study, said in a press release.

"If indeed the evolution of our hand proportions were associated with selection for fighting behavior you might expect the primary target, the face, to have undergone evolution to better protect it from injury when punched," added Carrier, who is a University of Utah biologist.

With that in mind, Carrier and colleague Michael Morgan, a University of Utah physician, studied both modern skulls and those of australopiths. They compared differences between males and females, and noted how facial bones respond to impacts.

The researchers found that bones that suffer the highest rates of fractures in fights are the same parts of the skull that exhibited the greatest increase in sturdiness during the evolution of our early human relatives. These bones are also the parts of the skull that show the greatest difference between males and females in both australopiths and humans today.

"In other words," Carrier said, "male and female faces are different because the parts of the skull that break in fights are bigger in males. Importantly, these facial features appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time that our ancestors evolved hand proportions that allow the formation of a fist."

He continued, "Together, these observations suggest that many of the facial features that characterize early hominins may have evolved to protect the face from injury during fighting with fists."

What were our prehistoric ancestors fighting about? Based on human behavior today and other primate behavior, it's likely that they often fought over mates, territory and other resources. They also might have just gotten on each other's nerves. After all, some were often cooped up for periods of time in caves and rock shelters.

If the latest theory holds true, then other ideas about human evolution go out the window. For example, French philosopher Rousseau argued that, before civilization, humans were noble savages and that civilization corrupted us, making us more violent.

Our distant past probably wasn't very tranquil, though.

"The hypothesis that our early ancestors were aggressive could be falsified if we found that the anatomical characters that distinguish us from other primates did not improve fighting ability," Carrier said. "What our research has been showing is that many of the anatomical characters of great apes and our ancestors, the early hominins (such as bipedal posture, the proportions of our hands and the shape of our faces) do, in fact, improve fighting performance."

Read more at Discovery News

Evolution of a bimetallic nanocatalyst

Atomic-scale snapshots of a bimetallic nanoparticle catalyst in action have provided insights that could help improve the industrial process by which fuels and chemicals are synthesized from natural gas, coal or plant biomass. A multi-national lab collaboration led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has taken the most detailed look ever at the evolution of platinum/cobalt bimetallic nanoparticles during reactions in oxygen and hydrogen gases.

"Using in situ aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy (TEM), we found that during the oxidation reaction, cobalt atoms migrate to the nanoparticle surface, forming a cobalt oxide epitaxial film, like water on oil," says Haimei Zheng, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division who led this study. "During the hydrogen reduction reaction, cobalt atoms migrate back into the bulk, leaving a monolayer of platinum on the surface. This atomic information provides an important reference point for designing and engineering better bimetallic catalysts in the future."

Bimetallic catalysts are drawing considerable attention from the chemical industry these days because in many cases they offer superior performances to their monometallic counterparts. There is also the possibility of tuning their catalytic performances to meet specific needs. A bimetallic catalyst of particular interest entails the pairing of platinum, the gold standard of monometallic catalysts, with cobalt, a lesser catalyst but one that is dramatically cheaper than platinum. The platinum/cobalt catalyst is not only considered a model system for the study of other bimetallic nanocatalysts, it is also an excellent promoter of the widely used Fischer-Tropsch process, in which mixtures of hydrogen and carbon monoxide are converted into long-chain carbons for use as fuels or in low-temperature fuel cells.

"While there have been many studies on platinum/cobalt and other bimetallic catalysts, information on how reactions proceed atomically and what the morphology looks like has been missing," Zheng says. "To acquire this information it was necessary to map the atomic structures in reactive environments in situ, which we did using specially equipped TEMs."

The in situ environmental TEM experiments were carried out at both the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, which is located at PNNL, and at BNL's Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Ex situ aberration-corrected TEM imaging was done at Berkeley Lab's National Center for Electron Microscopy using TEAM 0.5, the world's most powerful TEM.

"This work is an excellent example of collaborative team-work among multiple institutes," Zheng says. "Having access to such high-end resources and being able to form such close team collaborations strengthens our ability to tackle challenging scientific problems."

The in situ aberration corrected TEM studies of Zheng and her colleagues revealed that because of a size mismatch between the lattices of the cobalt oxide epitaxial film and the platinum surface, the cobalt oxide lattice is compressively strained at the interface to fit on the platinum lattice. As the strain energy relaxes, the cobalt oxide film starts breaking up to form distinct molecular islands on the platinum surface. This reduces the effective reaction surface area per volume and creates catalytic voids, both of which impact overall catalytic performance.

"By taking this segregation of the platinum and cobalt atoms into consideration, the interfacial strain that arises during oxidation can be predicted," Zheng says. "We can then design nanoparticle catalysts to ensure that during reactions the material with higher catalytic performance will be on surface of the nanoparticles."

Read more at Science Daily

Exotic particle: Exotic bound states comprising more than three quarks confirmed

For decades, physicists have searched in vain for exotic bound states comprising more than three quarks. Experiments performed at Jülich's accelerator COSY have now shown that, in fact, such complex particles do exist in nature. This discovery by the WASA-at-COSY collaboration has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The measurements confirm results from 2011, when the more than 120 scientists from eight countries discovered for the first time strong indications for the existence of an exotic dibaryon made up of six quarks.

For a long time, physicists were only able to reliably verify two different classes of hadrons: volatile mesons comprising one quark and one antiquark and baryons consisting of three quarks. Protons and neutrons, which make up atomic nuclei, are examples of the latter. In recent years, however, there has been growing evidence for the existence of additional types of hadrons, for example, hybrids, glueballs, and multiquarks. In 1964, the physicist Freeman Dyson was the first to predict such more complex states. But any reliable verification proved impossible for many years because almost no measurements could be reproduced.

Only recently, other research groups -- independently of each other -- found strong indications for short-lived, exotic particles comprising four quarks, so called "tetraquarks." The new bound state, which has now been verified at COSY, means that yet another class of exotic particles has been identified. "The new resonance that we observed confirms that quarks really do exist in six-packs. This discovery could open the door to new physical phenomena," says group spokesman Prof. Heinz Clement from the University of Tübingen.

The structure that was first discovered in 2011 is extremely short-lived and could only be detected via its decay products. The transient intermediate state -- technical term: resonance -- exists for a mere hundred-sextillionth (10 to the power of -23) of a second before it decays. This time span is so short that, for example, light can travel just a distance equivalent to the diameter of a small atomic nucleus.

Whether all six quarks form a single compact entity or rather a "hadronic molecule" has yet to be clarified. The latter would be composed of several nuclear building blocks -- for example of excited protons and neutrons bound to each other -- yet much more strongly than inside an atomic nucleus.

"The measurements that we performed at COSY in 2011 were already very precise. But because the experiments could not be repeated at any other accelerator worldwide, we had to come up with another experiment to verify the results," explains Prof. Hans Ströher, director at the Nuclear Physics Institute (IKP-2) in Jülich.

Read more at Science Daily