The US military is developing an remote-controlled airborne detection system that bounces radar off buildings to follow vehicles though a city

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week:

At an awards ceremony on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., Intel Corp. and the Society...

A compound of iron and nitrogen exceeds the known limits for magnetism

Quick eyes help with foraging and navigation

Marine biologists look for better ways to save whales tangled in fishing gear.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The National Science Foundation has awarded $1.65 million to a project led by Washington University in St. Louis physicist Ken Kelton to build an electrostatic levitation chamber that will be installed at the Spallation Neutron Source in Oakridge National Laboratory. Using neutrons as a probe, the instrument will allow scientists to watch atoms in a suspended drop of liquid as the drop cools and solidifies.

Paleontologists have stumbled across a scientific first that’s sure to inspire both fascination and disgust: coprolites, or fossilized fecal matter, bearing the distinct impressions of a creature’s teeth.

The coprolites — one chunk of rock is fist-sized, the other is about 30 percent larger — were discovered on a beach along the western shore of Chesapeake Bay, says Stephen Godfrey, a paleontologist at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Md.

The impressions in the coprolites are as much as 6.5 millimeters (just over a quarter of an inch) deep, Godfrey and a colleague report online March 9 in Naturwissenschaften. A silicone rubber mold of the tooth marks indicates that the biter was most likely a close relative of today’s tiger shark.

This fossilized poop doesn’t include visible bits of bone, feather or fish scales like similar coprolites unearthed from 15-million-year-old rocks in the nearby cliffs. But the hunks do have a phosphate-rich composition that hints the fecal matter came from a creature that had fed on bony prey. This, along with the size of the coprolites, suggests they came from a large animal, possibly a crocodilian, Godfrey says.

Although sharks are known to taste-test possible prey, Godfrey thinks it’s unlikely that the shark just took a nip of poop floating by to test its palatability. For one thing, he says, the tooth impressions are much deeper on one side of each coprolite than on the other — a scenario that’s unlikely if the delicate fecal matter had been free-floating.

Instead, the researchers contend, the disparity in the depth of the impressions probably resulted because the fecal matter was still inside the shark’s prey, or constrained within disemboweled intestines, when bitten.

Images: Stephen Godfrey.

The Large Hadron Collider set a new record for the creation of energetic particle beams this morning. The particle accelerator, which surpassed Fermilab’s Tevatron in December as the baddest atom smasher of them all, smashed its own record, charging particles to 3.48 trillion electron volts.

That’s three times the energy of any beam ever created by human beings and just a shade under half the LHC’s proposed maximum capabilities.

After a series of mishaps and repairs over the last year and a half, CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology Steve Myers sounded a triumphant note.

“Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHC’s overall design, and the improvements we’ve made since the breakdown in September 2008,” Myers said in a press release. “And it’s a great credit to the patience and dedication of the LHC team.”

The LHC could allow scientists to better understand the nature of mass, dark matter and the origins of the universe. But many of them hope that instead of confirming the current set of theoretical models we have all come to know — string theory, dark energy, the Higgs-Boson, etc. — something entirely unexpected will emerge from the CERN-run experiment.

Next up for the massive experiment is to collide those beams together to create a spectacular tiny explosion that could confirm or challenge decades of theoretical predictions. By sorting through the wreckage, physicists may find particular subatomic particles that will only exist under certain theoretical scenarios. For example, the detection of certain types of supersymmetric particles, aka sparticles, could be seen as what physicist Michio Kaku calls, “signals from the 11th dimension.”

While the LHC’s beam energies are certainly impressive, raw power is just one component of the quality of the data that a particle accelerator can produce. Understanding the incredible, almost unfathomable amounts of information that result from the collisions of beams requires iterative fine-tuning and learning by doing.

So, while the Tevatron, the last great American particle accelerator, may be chugging along at just under a trillion electron-volts, it’s still got an outside shot at finding the Higgs-Boson particle before the LHC can find or exclude it. And that could be a fitting final act before the high-energy physics torch passes wholly from Batavia, Illinois, to Geneva.

Photo: A piece of the Compact Muon Solenoid/CERN

See Also:

• Complete Wired Science coverage of the Large Hadron Collider

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

All today's stories on newscientist.com at a glance, including: why we should take control of statistics, an app for credit card theft, and proof that orang-utans can swim

Grigoriy Perelman has been recognised for solving the century-old Poincaré conjecture – but the real puzzle is whether he'll take the cash

Henry Schlesinger's enthralling The Battery tells the story of the modern world through the humble miracle of electricity in a handy package

Getting to the nub of the hubs is still a problem for the U.S....

In The Natural Navigator, Tristan Gooley – the only person to have flown and sailed solo across the Atlantic – tells us how to read natural signposts

A faint streak near Jupiter's moon Himalia may be a new ring formed by the material created by a smash between moons

Researchers hide a tiny bump from near-infrared light

We are finally pinning down how much differences in non-coding DNA, which doesn't produce proteins, shape our individual traits and disease risks

The spectacular imagery of Saturn taken by the Cassini probe has captured a series of unexplained phenomena on the ringed planet – see them here

They normally avoid water, so it was a surprise when orphan apes found all sorts of reasons to jump in – our gallery reveals what they get up to

This approach to cutting carbon dioxide emissions would involve mailing citizens refund checks.

Even as the health care bill grabs headlines, details are beginning to emerge about a new energy and climate bill being pieced together in Washington by trio of U.S. senators. According to Energy Washington, an eight-page outline of the bill includes provisions for something called a "cap-and-refund" approach to reducing carbon dioxide emissions.