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(PhysOrg.com) -- By finding a clever way to use the Earth itself as a scientific instrument, members of a SLAC-led research team turned the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope into a positron detector – and confirmed a startling discovery from 2009 that found an excess of these antimatter particles in cosmic rays, a possible sign of dark matter.

From Nature magazine It sounds like a conspiracy theory: 'cosmic rays' from deep space might be creating clouds in Earth's atmosphere and changing the climate. Yet an experiment at CERN, Europe's high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, is finding tentative evidence for just that

(PhysOrg.com) -- Jasper Kirkby, a physicist at CERN and colleagues have built an experimental climate chamber to measure the impact of cosmic rays on aerosol creation to mimic the creation of clouds in Earth's atmosphere. So far, as the team describes in their paper published in Nature, there appears to be some evidence of aerosol creation, but not enough to account for cloud formation, and thus there’s no evidence yet to show that cosmic rays have an impact on global temperatures.

Italian researchers using data from the satellite PAMELA have proven that theories showing there ought to be a ring of antiprotons encircling the Earth due to cosmic rays colliding with nuclei in the upper atmosphere are correct. Piergiorgio Picozza from the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, and a host of colleagues have published the results of their findings in arXiv.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Some chemical elements appear much more abundantly in nature than others, which is partly due to how the elements originally formed. Scientists know that the light elements (hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and traces of lithium) were produced by fusion in the early Universe. Today, lithium, beryllium, and boron are constantly being produced in cosmic rays, while the heavier elements (up to iron) are formed by fusion in stars.