Scientists at CERN, the research facility that’s home to the Large Hadron Collider, claim to have successfully created and stored antimatter in greater quantities and for longer times than ever before.

Researchers created 38 atoms of antihydrogen – more than ever has been produced at one time before and were able to keep the atoms stable enough to last one tenth of a second before they annihilated themselves (antimatter and matter destroy each other the moment they come into contact with each other). Since those first experiments, the team claims to have held antiatoms for even longer, though they weren’t specific of the duration.

While scientists have been able to create particles of antimatter for decades, they had previously only been able to produce a few particles that would almost instantly destroy themselves.

‘This is the first major step in a long journey,’ Michio Kaku, physicist and author of Physics of the Impossible, told PCMag. ‘Eventually, we may go to the stars.’

For now, scientists are interested in producing antimatter in these relatively large quantities because it could lend insight into fundamental physical laws. It’s generally believed in the scientific community that at the universe’s creation, both matter and antimatter existed but not in […]

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Senate Republicans voted unanimously Wednesday against a bill that would work to ensure fair pay for women, the Paycheck Fairness Act. The vote was 58-41.

Despite the Senate having majority support, Democrats couldn’t muster the 60 votes they needed to overcome a Republican filibuster.

Several Republicans who voted for another women’s rights bill last year, The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, opposed this iteration.

Those senators included Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both Republicans from Maine. The bill would have expanded enforcement of equal pay laws.

Collins argued that the bill would place undue burden on small business, and ‘impose increased costs and restrictions on small businesses in an already difficult economic climate.’

Her statement echoes rhetoric from the US Chamber of Commerce, which has routinely used small business as a defense for opposing all manner of progressive legislation. In fact, Collins even cited the Chamber’s opposition to the bill in her statement.

‘Many business groups oppose this legislation, including the National Federation of Independent Businesses, our nation’s largest small business advocacy group, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,’ Collins said.

Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine also declined to back the expansion of enforcing equal pay for women, even though she’d been supportive of a similar […]

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On Medscape Physician Connect (MPC) an online ‘physicians only’ website, one primary care doctor wrote recently, ‘I laugh every time they discuss healthcare policy, the real issue should be how to save primary care.’

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The ongoing ‘turmoil’ roiling megabanks and their faulty home foreclosure practices may represent deeper, more systemic problems regarding the origination, transfer and ownership of millions of mortgages, potentially putting Wall Street on the hook for billions of dollars in unexpected losses and threatening to undermine ‘the very financial stability that the Troubled Asset Relief Program was designed to protect,’ a government watchdog warns in a new report.

Recent revelations regarding mortgage companies’ use of ‘robo-signers’ when processing foreclosure documents ‘may have concealed much deeper problems in the mortgage market,’ according to the Tuesday report by the Congressional Oversight Panel, an office formed to keep tabs on the bailout.

Disclosures by big banks that they employed people whose sole job was to essentially rubber-stamp foreclosure documents without reading them or verifying basic facts led firms like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America to halt home repossessions beginning in late summer and early fall.

In turn, all 50 state attorneys general, federal prosecutors and a host of federal agencies began probing exactly what went wrong, and whether the use of robo-signers represented a one-time mistake or if they’re emblematic of broader legal shortcuts taken to cut costs and disguise other shortcomings. The industry […]

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One of every seven Medicare beneficiaries who is hospitalized is harmed as a result of problems with the medical care there, according to a new study from the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services.

The study said unexpected adverse events added at least $4.4 billion a year to government health costs and contributed to the deaths of about 180,000 patients a year.

In a single month, October 2008, the report estimated that some 134,000 Medicare patients experienced at least one adverse event, ranging from a temporary health setback to death, during a hospital stay. It said 44 percent of them were ‘clearly or likely preventable.

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