It's an interesting article in spite of the silly title. The researchers made a joke article and it went more popular than the serious research article :(.<p>I propose to change the title to "Dark matter detection in traces in granite (and humans)" but it breaks all the official and unofficial guidelines.<p>Note that the volume and lifetime of granite is much bigger than humans, so if they didn't find any trace in granite they don't expect to find one in humans. Also, IIUC there is nothing special about organic matter.<p>How "loud" would it be an event like this in the middle of the sea? Can it be heard with the acoustic detectors to detect roge nuclear explosions?
Hm. They claim to have zero unexplained gunshot-like injuries in Canada, the United States, and Western Europe over a ten year period. I find this hard to believe. Even if every gun injury was currently attributed to an identifiable shooter (a claim which would itself surprise me) miscarriages of justice are a known thing and people do get convictions overturned.<p>It’s still an interesting idea, but where did “none” come from?
From a terminal ballistics background, it seems very unlikely that this injury would appear to be a gunshot wound.<p>Bullets behave very differently according to their mass and velocity, not just their energy. A wound channel for this a particle would likely be very different from any bullet.
Purely anecdotal at this point but I remember hearing on the news in the mid 90s about a woman in the Boulder/Denver area who was killed by a “stray bullet” of unknown origin while sitting in her house. So these types of deaths are not <i>entirely</i> unheard of, if we just go by the scant details of this article.
Maybe this is what spontaneous human combustion is? People burst into flames randomly.<p>If this hit a human body and expanded as a ball of plasma, it might not look like a bullet wound like they think but it'd just burn the person alive, and there's plenty of recorded accounts of that happening.<p>Previously it's been attributed to the body losing control of its ability to regulate its temperature (homeostasis) but this mechanism seems way more plausible, they get hit by a particle of this that expands as a super heated ball of plasma and burns them alive inside out.
This is an interesting outcome. It is something that I've also been bothered by the Dark Matter hypothesis which is how it is always "somewhere else". Dark energy theories tweak the equations the other way and are equally troublesome. The idea a bunch of people can be used as a detector is pretty humorous too.<p>I expect that resolving this question will be the source of many Nobel prizes.
Reminds me of the concept of negative mass matter as dark matter. That would make getting hit by it very difficult as it repels and is repelled by regular matter and thus would constantly flee all normal mass. Not sure it would be very consistent with the observed universe though.
On a similar note: "How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?" [0].<p>BTW, this happens in the novel "Iron Sunrise" by Charles Stross, where people on an Earth-like planet suffer the misfortune of their star reaching (artificially) the supernova stage.<p>[0] <a href="https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/" rel="nofollow">https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/</a>
What is the probability of this occurring within a noticeable time-frame?<p>Without an estimate a lack of occurrence does not disprove anything. Even if dark matter is supposed to make up 85% of the universe it is unlikely to be distributed in the same way as other matter. For example if it does not interact with gravity, or as strongly, it could be comparatively uniformly distributed or at least more dispersed compared to matter. In which case the probability of a particle intersecting a human would be astronomical.<p>Just opening this door, but some actual estimates from those with the domain knowledge and experience would be nice.
What if we just took a bunch of old steel I-beams, cut them into sheets, ground and polished them flat, then scanned with a scanning tunnelling electron microscope and looked for evidence of interaction with dark matter? You could run an experiment with observations going back to the production of the steel... 100+ years of data at the get go.
What exactly was it again that leads humanity to assume dark matter is a thing?<p>Last I checked, it was the unexplained speed of the outer parts of spiral galaxies that lead us to assume that dark matter must be the cause.<p>Have there been any recent developments to further solidify that dark matter is a thing?
> a macro impact typically heats the cylinder of tissue carved out along its path to a temperature of 10^7 K[18, 19], resulting in an expanding cylinder of plasma inside the body<p>bummer