ScienceDaily reports: A microchip about the size of a grain of rice can generate a highly organized "rainbow" of light, a capability that could eventually support faster, higher-capacity 6G communications and extremely precise timing for quantum technologies. Physicists at Loughborough University, working with an international research team, demonstrated a system that produces a series of precisely spaced light frequencies. Those optical frequencies can then be converted into multiple high-frequency electromagnetic signals known as millimeter waves.

Millimeter waves are attracting growing interest for future communications because they can provide considerably more bandwidth, giving networks more room to transmit data. A major obstacle, however, has been producing these signals with the precision and stability required for advanced applications... "They could ultimately contribute to faster, higher capacity 6G networks," [said Dr. Luke Peters, of Loughborough University's Emergent Photonics Research Centre], "but the potential goes far beyond communications. These frequencies could also be used in radar systems as well as spectroscopy and astronomical instruments, helping scientists study materials and make extremely precise measurements of the universe.

"These applications are still some way off, and there are challenges to overcome before the technology can be used in real-world systems — but our latest work has tackled a major one..." A microcomb generates an extremely precise set of light frequencies arranged somewhat like the colors in a rainbow, although the light itself is invisible to the human eye. A specialized antenna can then convert those optical frequencies into millimeter waves. Earlier research demonstrated that microcombs could produce a single precise millimeter wave frequency. Generating many frequencies simultaneously could be far more useful because each could potentially serve as a separate channel for transmitting information at the same time. Achieving that, however, requires a microcomb with exceptional stability and signal quality.

In a new Nature Communications paper, the Loughborough led researchers report a system capable of doing exactly that.
Their system connects its chip-based microresonator to a much larger loop of optical fiber where laser light continuously travels through both parts of the system, according to the article.

"The team is now investigating how the microcomb system could eventually move from a laboratory experiment into practical technology."

A team of researchers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale engineered yeast to create cookies that were 3D printed out of plastic waste, reports Futurism: The yeast breaks down the components of plastic compounds and agricultural byproducts like discarded plant stalks into proteins, fats, acids, and flavorings that we can eat. When these are combined together, the mixture is fed into a 3D printer that spits out cookies of any desired shape. The researchers chose to print their cookies as the Greek letter Â, creating what they call "ÂBites" — or micro bites. They haven't actually eaten one of their ÂBites yet, as they wait for university approval... "I think it has a pleasant, appealing aroma," Lahiru Jayakody, a microbiologist at SIU who led the research, told NewScientist. "And it will taste good, too. We've not tasted it, but it smells good — that's for sure — like a real cookie...."

The researchers used CRISPR gene-editing technology to reprogram yeast strains to eat polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a widely used form of plastic commonly found in disposable water bottles, food packaging, and clothes, which is rich with carbon. Before the yeast can start feasting, the PET plastics are subjected to a process called oxidative hydrothermal dissolution to break them down into smaller bits that the microbes can digest. The purported advantage of this approach is that it's environmentally friendly, using only heat, water, and oxygen. The yeast feasts on these stripped-down plastic bits, turning them into a slurry of proteins, fats, and acids that're combined with fiber, starch, and sweetener to make them more palatable. One of the yeast strains in particular was able to turn plant biomass into tasty vanilla flavorings...

[R]ight now, it's an expensive process, costing around $60 to produce a kilogram of cookies, The Guardian reported. And some experts say it's wishful thinking to believe we can 3D-print, and then eat, ourselves out of these global problems with 3D-printed, delectable treats. "We produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste. You're not going to turn it all into cookies," Jason Hallett at Imperial College London told New Scientist. "So it's not a solution to the plastic-waste crisis. There's no way you could do this commercially. We're not gonna be eating plastic cookies."
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

SpaceX is scheduled to launch the Roman Space Telescope on a Falcon Heavy rocket, with the launch window opening at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). NASA will carry the launch live on YouTube.

CNN offers this mission overview from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "Roman will investigate dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe itself, and accelerate the future of discovery of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system." In fact, "NASA anticipates that Roman will image more than 50 times as much of the sky in the next five years as Hubble covered in three decades," reports USA Today, noting that "every single image it beams back to Earth will contain the equivalent of 100 pictures Hubble would capture." The barrel-shaped Roman telescope is due to set up operations nearly 1 million miles from Earth and begin scouring previously unobservable areas of the cosmos... NASA will make all of Roman's data available for anyone to peruse, meaning astronomers from all over the world will have the opportunity to make use of the observatory for advanced research, NASA says... Spanning 42 feet long and more than 14 feet wide, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is outfitted with two primary instruments
Its 300-megapixel near-infrared camera is built to look across the universe and study the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter, reports The Conversation. But it's also carrying a coronagraph instrument built to dramatically reduce the glare from distant stars "that will test the technology for future missions that plan to detect Earth-like planets around other stars."

The mission's generating some excitement. "Nearly three decades after dark energy's discovery, astronomers are letting themselves hope that a breakthrough is almost at hand," writes Scientific American, adding that cosmologists "are increasingly questioning the validity of their vaunted standard model, although no one can decide exactly what comes next." Roman will chase down three different ways of detecting dark energy, seeking to more precisely define what its effects on the universe are and whether they're changing over time. The first one involves surveying the skies for a special variety of supernova that's so predictable that scientists can use it as a beacon for calculating what a host galaxy's distance is and how fast it's moving away from us — the same technique that first betrayed dark energy back in the 1990s. The second entails mapping large numbers of galaxies to discern huge, faint bubbles in the cosmos that represent the fossilized signatures of sound waves that froze out of the universe's primordial plasma as it expanded and cooled. The sizes of those bubbles scale with the size and growth of the very early universe, offering a powerful probe for studying cosmic change over time. The third tracer uses a technique called microlensing, which reveals clumps of dark matter via their warping of background starlight, to fill in scientists' still incomplete reckoning of matter's cosmic distribution.
The Houston Chronicle reports that the telescope will also study rogue planets, isolated black holes, starquakes and planet-forming disks around nearby stars. "Almost regardless of what your scientific interest is, Roman is probably already planning to take observations," Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist at NASA, said during a July news conference."
NBC News reports that after the Roman telescope launches, "it's set to spend more than three months journeying to its final destination, located roughly 1 million miles from Earth." Three primary surveys are planned over the course of the Roman telescope's mission. During the largest one, which will last over a year, the telescope will peer through the Milky Way's dense, star-packed center, known as the galactic bulge, building a vast catalog of all the astronomical objects it observes. The second and third surveys will focus on dark matter and dark energy.
Axios notes that Roman's primary mirror "is about the same size as that of Hubble's, but at 80% less weight — reflecting huge tech advancements since Hubble was built in the 1970s." And NPR reports NASA began planning the $4.3 billion telescope 15 years ago to search for supernovas to help explore dark energy — when "a call came in from the government office in charge of surveillance satellites." "The National Reconnaissance Office reached out to NASA," [remembers cosmologist Daniel Scolnic at Duke University], "saying, 'We have this amazing satellite sitting in a hangar that we're not using. And what what do you guys think about instead of pointing downwards, we point upwards, and you guys use it?'" NASA said yes. It took some substantial modifications, but now that old satellite is set to become NASA's next major space observatory....

Another goal of the telescope is to spend a month surveying all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Julie McEnery is Roman's project scientist. She says even though Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as the currently orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, its design lets it do things much faster. "That one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble," says McEnery.

CNN reports that "A one-time snip of a key gene lowered heart-clogging cholesterol by about 50% over an entire year with no adverse effects, scientists have reported." The overwhelmingly positive results were found in four people who had taken the highest dose of the experimental treatment during a pilot study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in November 2025. That study was extremely small — only 15 patients with dangerously high cholesterol that did not respond to medication. The research was designed to test the safety of five different doses of a gene-altering infusion delivered by CRISPR-Cas9, a biological scissor which cuts a targeted genetic location to modify or turn a gene on or off. "If you'd asked me 15 years ago if we could have done something like this, I would have thought you were crazy," senior study author Dr. Steven Nissen, chief academic officer of the Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, told CNN previously.

An update on the study, published Friday in NEJM, appears to answer a key question: Does the intervention last? "Is something like this truly a one and done? That was always the question," said lead study author Dr. Luke Laffin, a preventive cardiologist at Cleveland Clinic's Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute. "This new data is essentially saying that the decreases in LDL cholesterol and triglycerides we saw at 60 days after treatment have lasted over a year," Laffin said. "In people who took the highest dose, the reduction seems durable and safe...."

If larger clinical trials show similar results, the procedure could be a game changer for young people with severe disease, preventive cardiologist Dr. Ann Marie Navar, an associate professor of cardiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, told CNN previously. "If you're 20 and you have really high cholesterol, it may make a lot more sense to have a one-time treatment that doesn't require you to have to take a pill every single day or shot every two weeks for the next 60 years," said Navar, who was not involved in the study. "The potential for this is just enormous."
Being born with this mutation naturally "drastically lowers or even eliminates a person's risk for heart disease," the article points out. And the study's senior author adds "now that CRISPR is here, we have the ability to change other people's genes so they too can have this protection."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A common sweetener used in products such as chewing gum, toothpaste, jam, yoghurts and ice-cream has been linked to an increased risk of strokes, heart attacks and death. Xylitol is a sugar alcohol present in some natural foods in very low amounts. It is also added -- often in amounts 1,000 times higher -- to artificially sweeten foods, beverages and oral care products. Despite its growing use, the long-term health impacts of xylitol have never been widely studied.

In the largest study of its kind, researchers found high blood levels of xylitol were associated with an increased risk of major adverse cardiovascular events. The findings were presented in Munich at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) annual congress, the world's largest heart conference. Researchers looked at 17,710 people and compared the 25% with the highest levels of xylitol in their blood against the 25% with the lowest. Those who had the highest amount were 57% more likely to die or suffer a heart attack or stroke, than those with the least, within six years. Even after 30 years, they were still 18% more likely to have suffered one of these cardiac events.

Taken with data from the middle quartiles, the results from both cohorts suggested a dose-dependent relationship: the higher the xylitol blood levels, the higher the cardiovascular event rate. Furthermore, the researchers showed that there was consistent increase in cardiovascular events with xylitol irrespective of baseline characteristics, such as age and sex. The researchers also highlighted that the association was independent of underlying factors such as body mass index, hypertension, diabetes and lipid levels, which might predispose people to low-calorie products.

SpaceX is significantly reducing Falcon 9 launches from Florida this year, ending the Space Coast's decade-long run as the world's busiest spaceport as more missions shift to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The slowdown is expected to continue until Starship begins flying regularly from Florida. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: A Falcon 9 launch early Tuesday was the last planned Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral until SpaceX begins flying Starship missions from Florida, according to Kiko Dontchev, the company's vice president of launch. For at least the rest of the year, and maybe longer, this means the launch rate at the Florida spaceport will drop from eight or nine per month to perhaps two per month.

It wasn't long ago when two launches per month was the norm, an indication of just how quickly SpaceX's launch cadence has grown. Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center sit on adjoining property and share the same range on Florida's east coast, so it is worth considering them a single spaceport. The last time the Florida spaceport did not lead the world in space launches was in 2015.

"From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on Starship," Dontchev wrote on X. "The West Coast team will continue regularly launching Starlink from Vandenberg." "Yep, that'll be louder -- but everybody knows the real action will be in Louisiana, starting in 2029 or so," writes schwit1. SpaceX on Tuesday announced plans to spend up to $100 billion building a new Starship launch facility in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, which the state says could eventually "support thousands of launches annually."

Further reading: Musk's other unstated reasons for shutting down Falcon 9 in Florida (Behind The Black)

President Trump awarded the four-member Artemis II crew the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and signed an executive order directing the creation of a new U.S. Space Academy. The proposed academy would train engineers, scientists, technicians, operators, and astronauts for NASA, the Space Force, and the commercial space industry. Houston Public Media reports: The Artemis II crew -- NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen -- retraced history as they flew around the moon and back in April, the first time humans have been in lunar territory since the 1970s. He had previously hosted the crew members at the White House following their mission and called them during the mission while the crew was tens of thousands of miles away. "The one thing that really sticks out to us [from that call] is you said how proud you are and how proud our nation is for the job that we've just accomplished," Wiseman said during Friday's ceremony. "And for us, that is what we set out to do. We wanted to inspire this nation to learn."

During the ceremony, Trump also signed an executive order to create the "United States Space Academy." Under the order, a Presidential Commission on the U.S. Space Academy has 120 days to create a report with guidelines for the U.S. Space Academy. The Commission will include NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman as its Chair, as well as other NASA and space officials. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Trump's Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president for science and technology. In effect, it allows the Trump Administration to build the U.S. Space Academy to its liking. "It will serve both the United States Space Force as well as NASA and the civilian spaceflight industry," Trump said. "And it will attract, train, graduate the very best that our nation and our nation really has to offer." As for where the academy will be located, Trump said he was "going to be choosing a location very shortly."

A French court has for the first time recognized cosmic radiation as a contributing occupational factor in a flight attendant's breast cancer, alongside passive smoking and years of night work. The landmark ruling could open the door to similar claims from other aircrew, as research continues to link long-term high-altitude flying with elevated exposure to radiation-related cancers. The BBC reports: Sophie Lainault, a 59 year-old former stewardess on Air France, sought to have her cancer recognized as an occupational disease, brought on by conditions at work. This has now been confirmed in a landmark court ruling in the southwestern town of Bayonne, which said that cosmic radiation was one of three carcinogenic hazards arising from her profession. [...] As stewardess and later purser on Air France airliners, Lainault clocked up 12,600 flight hours between 1989 and 2019. More than half of these were at night. Many long-distance high-altitude flights from Paris would have taken her near the North Pole, where exposure to radiation from space -- strictly speaking particles from the sun and other stars -- is the most intense.

A study this month at the Harvard Medical School in the US found that flight attendants and pilots had the highest level of radiation-related cancer deaths among more than 500 different professions. In all, about 6.9% of deaths among flight attendants and 6.7% of deaths among pilots were from radiation-related cancers, according to the analysis. These proportions were higher than for other professions including nuclear technologists, who are routinely exposed to radiation from non-cosmic sources yet placed 12th on the list, the authors said. "In France the link between breast cancer and certain hazards has been established for a number of professions, such as nurses ... but this is the first time for an air-hostess," said Lainault's lawyer Elisabeth Leroux.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Smithsonian Magazine: The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains. But how and why do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation paradox has stumped scientists for years. Now, however, a team of researchers say they may have solved the mystery.

If a brain ends up in a wet, oxygen-starved environment, the processes that usually cause decay can have the opposite effect, researchers report in a study published in the August 7 issue of the Journal of Proteome Research. "Under the right conditions, preservation actually arises from decay itself: The same reactions that degrade tissue can also weld the breakdown products together into something far tougher," study co-author Alexandra Seviour, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford in England, tells Live Science's Victoria Atkinson.

Following experiments on 72 mouse carcasses (described in the article) the scientists think they know why. When oxygen is abundant, it triggers a cascading, chemical chain reaction that causes brain proteins to break down rapidly. This sequence hinges on free radicals, highly reactive, unstable molecules that "steal" electrons from nearby atoms and molecules. The process happens in the brains of living people too, and if left unchecked, can cause health problems. In low-oxygen environments, however, this chemical sequence appears to play out differently. The researchers' analyses hint that free radicals instead react and bond with nearby proteins, making the overall tissue tougher and more resistant to decomposition, Seviour tells Chemical and Engineering News' Anirban Mukhopadhyay. The findings show that "decay is not the opposite of preservation but, under specific chemical constraints, one of its mechanisms," the researchers write in the paper.

SpaceX plans to spend up to $100 billion building a new Starship launch facility in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, which the state says could eventually "support thousands of launches annually." CNBC reports: Once built, Starbase, LA will serve as the main launch facility for Starship, SpaceX's in-development rocket that's the largest ever built and designed to be fully reusable. Musk has aspirations to massively expand SpaceX's Starlink satellite network, to launch orbital data centers and to someday colonize Mars. Those ambitions, and justification for SpaceX's nearly $2 trillion market cap, hinge on the success of Starship.

SpaceX said, in a video posted to its website on Tuesday, that the search for a site to build launch pads and have access to ample fuel for its operations took about seven years. Musk said in the video that the company would bring "probably 10,000 really exciting jobs" to Louisiana with the spaceport. A fact sheet posted online by the state of Louisiana said SpaceX is expected to generate an estimated "3,000 direct new jobs over the next 10 years" in the state, and "8,100 indirect new jobs." SpaceX said it would work on a "historic coastal restoration" in Louisiana, in partnership with the state to "bring the marsh back" and ensure the wetlands around its new facility will have "storm protection."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Antibodies play a central role in your body's immune defense. But they're also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery. In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, discovered that some of the images used to demonstrate how these antibodies performed in lab experiments had been subject to image manipulation -- the sorts of changes that would get a paper retracted if they had appeared in the academic literature. The manipulations ranged from removing background noise to copying and pasting data to fabricate results. Now, he has done a more exhaustive search and found problematic manipulations in images used to market over 17,000 commercial antibodies.

[...] The consequences of this discovery are pretty significant. If you buy an antibody believing it will generate clean, clear data and find it doesn't, many researchers will assume the problem is them. That often leads them to spend time troubleshooting the procedure and trying slightly different conditions to get useful data. If the antibody can't produce those results, all the troubleshooting will have been a waste of time and money. Nature's coverage of the new findings includes quotes from several companies that sell these antibodies that, paraphrased, range from "we'll look into it" to "we don't think it's a problem." Researchers who have spent time frustrated while failing to get an antibody-based experiment to work may think otherwise.

The FDA has authorized the first wearable in the U.S. to continuously monitor ketone levels and the first device globally to track both ketones and glucose together in a single system. From a report: [Abbott's] Libre Duo 10 Day continuously measures both glucose and ketone levels in the fluid just beneath the skin every minute, day and night. Readings are transmitted wirelessly to a compatible smartphone, where users can view current glucose and ketone levels and whether those values are trending up or down. The device also can send automatic alerts if ketone levels reach a concerning threshold. The FDA noted that ketone information should be interpreted in the context of glucose readings and symptoms.

Ketones are produced when the body uses fat instead of glucose for energy. When ketone levels rise too high, patients with diabetes can develop diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), a serious complication that can progress quickly and become life-threatening without prompt treatment. Until now, patients who needed ketone monitoring had to test separately using methods that provided a single measurement at one point in time. Those tests could not show whether ketone levels were rising or falling. For patients with diabetes -- particularly those at higher risk for DKA -- continuous glucose and ketone monitoring may provide earlier warning of metabolic deterioration and support timelier sick-day management, hydration, insulin adjustment, and escalation of care when clinically appropriate.

China has delayed its ambitious Chang'e 7 lunar mission until at least 2027 after scrubbing an August 24 launch. Poor weather conditions were likely a factor, with China's Manned Space Agency (CMSA) saying the decision reflects the need for "absolute safety." Scientific American reports: China and the U.S. are in a race to send humans back to the moon, a feat that that U.S. accomplished in the 1960s and that has never been achieved by any other country. Chang'e 7 is to play to a crucial part in China's ambitions: the probe is designed to search for frozen water in the Shackleton Crater, a pit that spans some 21 kilometers (13 miles) and sits beside the lunar south pole.

No spacecraft has ever landed in that region, which scientists consider to be among the likeliest places to find water on the moon. Locating water that can be used by humans is vital to establishing any long-term lunar presence. NASA and China are eyeing the region to establish a crewed base -- and because this real estate is so precious, it matters who gets their first. Ars Technica notes in its reporting that the delayed launch was "most likely" due to Typhoon Narra, "which has 45 mph winds (equivalent to a moderate Tropical Storm) and continues to meander around in the waterway separating Hainan Island, where the spaceport is located, and mainland China."

As for why the next launch window won't open until next February or March? "It likely is a combination of factors, including sunlight conditions in polar landing zones as well as the mission plan that requires a 90-day lunar orbit reconnaissance before landing," reports Ars. There's also a possibility, albeit an unlikely one, that "some technical issue was discovered at the last minute with either the complex Chang'e 7 payload, or the rocket."

The FDA has cleared the first Alzheimer's blood test for symptomatic patients as young as 40. The test measures amyloid and tau biomarkers from a single blood draw and identified positive biomarkers with 97.6% accuracy in a validation study. New Atlas reports: PrecivityAD2 is a single blood test that quickly assesses the proteins amyloid and tau, using mass spectrometry to measure plasma AB42/40 and p-tau217/np-tau217. The results are then scored, qualifying as negative, likely positive, or positive for AD. "Just over a year ago, there were no FDA-cleared blood tests for Alzheimer's, and now we have three," Isobel Coleman, chief executive officer of the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), said in a statement. "This is a proof point that sustained, early investment in translational science plays a catalytic role in moving promising ideas from the lab to patients."

In a recent clinical validation study, 1,142 symptomatic adults were tested using PrecivityAD2. The process accurately identified 97.6% of positive biomarkers. What's more, the results remained consistent even in patients with comorbidities like chronic kidney disease and diabetes, which can distort plasma amyloid samples. It's worth noting that the test isn't intended for general health screenings, but for patients who already show some cognitive decline. "As PrecivityAD2 and tools like it move further into clinical practice, they will enable earlier detection, sharpen clinical trials, and build the foundation for precision medicine and combination therapies," Coleman added.

Gluons are the quantum 'Gorilla Glue' involved in binding quarks together, ScienceAlert reminds us. But for nearly 50 years, physicists have hunted for "glueballs", exotic particles predicted by this theory of the strong interaction — the only type of particle in nature composed entirely of force mediators:

Now, a collaboration working at a collider in Beijing says it has the clearest evidence yet that a known particle called X(2370) is dominated by one of these elusive states... Physicists sifted through the wreckage of high-energy particle collisions to find strong evidence of this glueball, made predominantly of gluons — massless force carriers of the strong interaction between quarks... The new evidence for this exotic, unstable glueball's ephemeral existence comes from a recent preprint on arXiv, presented at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Brazil... This collaboration uses the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II, a particle accelerator and collider that smashes electrons into their antimatter counterparts, called positrons, to probe perplexing particle physics.

The resultant glueball is an "unprecedented form of matter," says Jin Shan, a particle physicist at Nanjing University and one of the research team's leaders. "It not only enables the theory describing strong interactions to pass its most rigorous test, but also vastly expands the boundaries of our understanding of the physical world," he told Fan Chen at South China Morning Post... Previously, in a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters in 2024, the researchers analyzed 10 billion meson decay events. They measured the X(2370) particle's mass and spin parity — a property that dictates its interactions and almost-instantaneous decay — for the first time, finding complete agreement between their experimental values and predictions. Now, they've identified its additional decay modes and determined its flavor-singlet nature, "the most important characteristic of a glueball...."

The authors describe their work as the clearest experimental result to emerge from nearly 50 years of glueball searches, supporting the long-standing theoretical prediction that gluons can bind together into a new form of matter.
The discovery ""highlights advances in technology and analytical techniques that have recently revealed another decades-in-the-making physics mystery," the article points out.

"More experiments are needed to further confirm and constrain the prototypes of the highly esoteric glueball; in other words, more particle smashing."