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Charm my ass..

He just makes fun of the special olympics.

Meanwhile, in other news, researchers announced the discovery of yet another form of buffer overflow. The discovery was announced by a laboratory in Russia, where a newly discovered malformed URL was accelerated toward an IE8 target.

This story *sounds* interesting to me as it appeals to my sense of exploration and curiosity to learn new things but beyond that this stuff basically reads like sub-atomic particle physics to me

Here's my read on it: quarks are the constituents of a wide range of particles, from protons and neutrons to B-mesons etc. The fundamental interaction that holds these particles together is the "colour force" or "strong nuclear force", which arises due to the exchange of gluons between quarks in the same way that the electro-magnetic force arises because of the exchange of photons between charged particles.

Virtual particle exchange is made possible by the uncertainty principle, which for a massless particle like the photon produces forces with infinite range, but for gluons, which have mass, it results in a short-range force. As well as mass, gluons also have "colour charge", so they interact with each other as well as with quarks, resulting in the confinement property of the strong force: if you try to pull two bound quarks apart, the gluons holding them together self-interact in a way that makes the force stronger rather than weaker. If you pull really hard you get new quarks popping out of the vacuum, and jets of exotic particles. You never get a naked quark.

Computing the bound states of quarks is really, really hard because the force is so strong. The basic technique we use in quantum electro-dynamics is perturbation theory, where we get an approximate result and then apply a series of smaller and smaller corrections to it. Because of the self-interaction of the gluons, for quantum chromo-dynamics these corrections get larger and larger, and various other mathematical techniques have to used to get a well-behaved answer.

This means that while we can predict pretty well the excited states of atoms, we can't do that for quarks. I would bet the most likely form of this particle is some kind of multi-quark object (more than just a simple pair) whose existence depends on the details of the colour force. We are still learning what those details are, and this particle and others like it will be useful laboratories to reveal them.

So the significance of the discovery is that it provides us with a new way of studying quantum chromo-dynamic interactions. Not the world's biggest deal, but still very cool and useful.