NASA discovers antimatter beams shooting above thunderstorms

Looking for some antimatter to power the warp engines of a Federation starship? Perhaps not. If you were, however, scientists have determined we can look no further than above thunderstorms for some fuel for the starship Enterprise.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and its Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) detected the antimatter, beams shooting above thunderstorms. The phenomenon has never been seen before. Here's what NASA thinks is happening:

Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. [...]

Fermi is designed to monitor gamma rays, the highest energy form of light. When antimatter striking Fermi collides with a particle of normal matter, both particles immediately are annihilated and transformed into gamma rays. The GBM has detected gamma rays with energies of 511,000 electron volts, a signal indicating an electron has met its antimatter counterpart, a positron.

This discovery means that starship commanders won't have to head over to CERN to borrow (take) some of their antimatter from the Large Hadron Collider.

A woman's tears lower testosterone levels in men: study

You wouldn't think many men are turned on by a woman's tears, but in fact, scientists have apparently discovered that a woman's tears carries some still known chemical that reduces testosterone levels.

Merely sniffing a woman's tears, in fact, even when simply held in a vial and without the crying of the woman affecting a person emotionally, still carried the effect. The scientists from the Weizmann Institute carried out four different tests to confirm the results, although the report does not indicate the sample size or other details.

These tests were run using "emotional tears" obtained by showing female volunteers sad movies. The first experiment confirmed that men could not differentiate between tears and saline solution.

In the second experiment, male volunteers were subjected to a test either with tears or with saline solution, and shown images of women's faces. While the tears did not influence the men's estimates of sadness or empathy expressed in the faces, it did negatively affect the sex appeal attributed to the faces. The test was both double-blind and repeated over two days, reversing the saline vs. tears configuration for the men between the two days.

In the third experiment, male volunteers watched "emotional movies" after sniffing tears or saline. They were then asked to self-rate themselves on mood, as well as being monitored for physiological measures of arousal. Men smelling tears rated their sexual arousal lower, and physiologically, including in testosterone level, they showed a clear drop in arousal.

In the last trial, researchers repeated experiment three, but measured brain activity. Activity levels in brain areas associated with sexual arousal were significantly lower after the subjects had sniffed tears.

Further research is required. They did not identify the chemical involved, and at the same time, they didn't try men's tears or children's tears. It's unclear if they tried to extract "non-emotional tears," as well.

Still, it just goes to show why sad movies aren't generally used as a date movie.