Twice the Charm: A New Creature Joins the Particle Zoo

If you're in need of some charming news and a break from weather-related disaster coverage, this is your story. Today, in the American Physical Society's journal Physical Review Letters, a several-hundred-member team of CERN researchers announced the first unambiguous sighting of a baryon with two heavy quarks.So what exactly does that mean? Matter, all the visible stuff around us, is made of atoms. Atoms are made of three subatomic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. As far as we can t...