When it comes to antimatter, what goes up doesn't necessarily come down. In a new study, physicists weighed antimatter in an effort to determine how this strange cousin of matter interacts with gravity.

Ordinary matter atoms fall down due to the pull of gravity, but the same might not be true of antimatter, which has the same mass as matter, but opposite charge and spin. Scientists wondered whether antimatter atoms would instead fall up when pulled by gravity, and whether such a thing as antigravity exists.

"In the unlikely event that antimatter falls upward, we'd have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works," Joel Fajans, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in a statement.

Fajans and his colleagues at the Alpha experiment at Switzerland's CERN physics lab made the first experimental measurements of the gravitational mass of antihydrogen - the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen, made of an antiproton and a positron (the antimatter counterpart to an electron).

Conducting experiments on antimatter atoms is difficult, because when matter and antimatter meet, the two annihilate. Thus, any experimental apparatus that came into contact with the material being studied would be instantly destroyed. Scientists get around this predicament by building traps for antimatter made with magnets, which force antimatter particles to stay in a certain area. As soon as the magnets are turned off, the antimatter falls onto the walls of the trap and eviscerates.

But which direction does it fall toward?

Scientists have gotten their first close-up view of the enormous hurricane that has been churning for years at the North Pole of our solar system's ringed beauty Saturn.

The whirlwind sits at the center of a large and mysterious structure known as Saturn's hexagon, a polygon-shaped stream whose each side is larger than the entire Earth. Astronomers used NASA's Cassini spacecraft to fly right over the hexagon and captured the gigantic hurricane within. The eye of the system alone is 2,000 kilometers across, about half the length of Australia or - as Wolfram Alpha kindly points out - a bit bigger than the distance the Proclaimers would walk, just to be the man that walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door.

Though 20 times larger than an average Terran twister, the hurricane is very similar to the ones we see on Earth. Both have central eyes with low-hanging clouds surrounded by a wall of higher clouds spiraling around. Saturn's hurricane winds are four times stronger than those on Earth, whipping by at 530 kmph (330 mph). Cyclones on our planet also tend to move around but Saturn's polar storm has nowhere to go, remaining stuck in place for years.

Scientists were unable to see much of the storm until now because Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, when the planet's Northern Hemisphere was in its winter darkness. Spring arrived in 2009 and Cassini's planners had to choreograph the gravitational swings needed to get the spacecraft to fly by the maelstrom and get a good close-up view years in advance. A couple of mind-blowing false color images of the storm are below.

Scientists have color coded the clouds in Saturn's North Pole hurricane. Red clouds are lower while green clouds are higher in the atmosphere.

A false-color wide view of the North Pole hurricane and surrounding hexagon.

Two types of fish have been shown to use gestures, or sign language, to help one another hunt. This is the first time these types of gestures have been found to occur in animals other than primates and ravens.

Both types of fish, grouper and coral trout, are known for hunting cooperatively with other kinds of animals. Whereas the grouper hunts with giant moray eels and a fish called the Napoleon wrasse, coral trout partner up with octopuses to snag prey. A study published last week in the journal Nature Communications found that the fish are able to "point" their heads toward prey, to help out their hunting buddies.

After observing the fish in the wild for many hours, the researchers found that when a prey fish escaped its hunting party, a grouper occasionally moved over the place where the fugitive prey was hiding. The grouper would then rotate its body so that its head faced downward, and it would shake its head back and forth in the direction of the potential meal, in what researchers call a "headstand" signal. Coral trout make a similar sign, the researchers found.

An incoming comet that may well turn out to be the "comet of the century" could create an unusual kind of meteor shower, scientists say. When Comet ISON passes by the Earth this year, it is possible that the dust sloughed off by the comet's tail will create an odd meteor shower when the planet passes through the stream of tiny particles that once were a part of the comet's tail.

"Instead of burning up in a flash of light, they [the particles] will drift gently down to the Earth below," University of Western Ontario meteor scientist Paul Wiegert said in a statement. [See Photos of Comet ISON]


The specks of dust will be travelling at a speed of 125,000 mph (201,168 km/h), but once they hit the Earth's atmosphere, they will slow to a halt, according to Wiegert's computer models.

Nadim Chebli remembers well the first of his customers who decided to pay for the records they bought with virtual currency rather than cash or credit cards.

"I'd only just agreed to accept Bitcoins," said the 36-year-old owner of the Long Player record shop, "and the first sales I made in it came pretty quickly, from a guy about my age who bought Tom Waits's The Big Time and a young woman who bought a Beatles compilation from 1967."

In the few months since Chebli signed up to the peer-to-peer electronic cash system, he finds it hard to come up with definitive characteristics for the "typical" Bitcoin user who walks off the street into what he describes as his "vinyl living room". "There's no typical age group, or sex, just, well, regular folk," he said.

Florentina Martens has had the same experience since opening her Parisian-style cafe Floor's two months ago just a couple of streets away. "There is not a prototype Bitcoin payer," she said. "It's random people. Not only nerds, let me put it that way."

Like Chebli, Martens, whose Kersenvlaai (cherry cake) from her native Maastricht is rated as one of the best culinary offerings of the area, says she decided to accept Bitcoins because of the ease, cheapness and transparency of its payment system.

UK and US scientists are seeking to alter the genes of dairy cows in order to make them hornless. The modification is meant to make the livestock safer to deal with, and spare them the painful de-horning practice currently used by farmers.

Scientists have managed to single out DNA that suppresses horn growth in other breeds of cattle, which they now intend to implant into the genome of the Holstein cows - the world's highest-production dairy breed.

"This would be a major advance in animal welfare," Geoff Simm, a scholar and chair of the UK government's Farm Animal Genetic Resources Committee said, according to the Sunday Times. The idea - the brainchild of scientists at Edinburgh's Roslin Institute - will now be brought to life by their partners from the University of Minnesota, who were already conducting similar research.

Scott Fahrenkrug, a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota, has extracted a short strip of DNA from the genome of Red Angus cattle. The strip, which is known to halt horn growth, was then inserted into the cells from a Holstein bull called Randy.

Montevideo, Uruguay - Scientists in Uruguay have announced the world's first genetically-modified phosphorescent sheep.

Nine sheep were born in October of 2012 at Uruguay's Institute of Animal Reproduction, an experiment conducted in conjunction with the Institute Pasteur.

The scientists used a gene from a jellyfish, allowing them to produce a green fluorescent protein.

The scientists say the sheep developed normally. They claim there are no differences to their non-modified peers.

Astronomy students at Wakefield's Horbury Academy were in Hawaii and Australia for two nights to stargaze through the remote Faulkes telescope as part of a GCSE project.

They focused their study on a space object that had been observed before as a possible asteroid but its classification had not been formally noted.

After studying the data, the group were able to rule out the space matter as an asteroid but also anything that had previously been discovered.

The Year 11 pupils sent off their analysis to the Minor Planet Centre in Massachusetts and were amazed to be told they had discovered a new comet.

The comet was officially registered with the centre and given the name C/2013G9 (TENAGRA).

The site of Stonehenge - that mysterious collection of British rocks that could have served as a calendar using the stars - was also a graveyard for the elite, according to new research.

A British group led by the University College London looked at 63 bodies surrounding the historical site. They determined these people were part of a group of elite families that brought their relatives to Stonehenge for burial over more than 200 years, starting from 2,900 BC.

The bodies were buried long before the rocks visible today were erected, though.

"The first Stonehenge began its life as a huge graveyard," stated UCL's Parker Pearson, who led the study. "The original monument was a large circular enclosure built 500 years before the Stonehenge we know today, with the remains of many of the cremated bodies originally marked by the bluestones of Stonehenge. We have also discovered that the second Stonehenge was built 200 years earlier than thought, around 2500 BC."

(Phys.org) - Every year millions of birds make heroic migratory journeys across oceans and continents guided by the Earth's magnetic field. How they detect those magnetic fields has puzzled scientists for decades.

But now a collaboration between the Keays lab at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna and researchers at The University of Western Australia's Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation and Analysis (CMCA) has added some important pieces to the puzzle.

Their work, published today in the online version of Current Biology, reports the discovery of iron balls in sensory neurons. These neural cells, called hair cells, are found in the ear and are responsible for detecting sound and gravity. Remarkably, each cell has a single iron ball, and it's in the same place in every cell.

"It's very exciting. We find these iron balls in every bird, whether it's a pigeon or an ostrich, but not in humans," said Mattias Lauwers, the IMP researcher who discovered the balls.

CMCA research associate Dr Jeremy Shaw, who has studied iron in a range of animals from molluscs to humans, said it was an astonishing finding.