I'd leapt at the title, thinking that the article claimed evidence for a fourth-generation (u,d), (c,s), (t,b), (something new) quark, which would be incredible news. This article describes the potential observation of a four-quark bound system, made up of known quarks in a novel arrangement.
A quick tutorial on how all this fits together in a single atom:<p><a href="http://ideonexus.com/2008/10/07/elementary-particles-at-the-quantum-zoo/" rel="nofollow">http://ideonexus.com/2008/10/07/elementary-particles-at-the-...</a>
Fun times in high energy physics. Can someone point to a reference describing particles with both regular and anti- flavors of quark? There is a mention here of particles with both charm and charm- quarks in the same particle.
Misleading headline alert: the hinted particle is two quarks and two anti-quarks, which is not quite the same thing as "four quarks" (which would be _very_ surprising because four is not a multiple of three).
Reading some of these articles makes me feel like that line from Thor where you get to a point where magic and science sort of blend together as we use and build enormous alchemist machines with reproducible effects.<p>I greatly look forward to the day where we can apply what we've been learning through all this experimentation to design and create things that actively and usefully manipulate particles at this level.