// ARS TECHNICA — HARDWARE & GADGET
Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed
Also: Spooky action at the LHC, Ice Age psychoactive use, yeast for building homes on Mars, and more.
It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. September’s list includes a tantalizing hint of the elusive dark matter at the LUX-ZEPLIN detector; entangled Z bosons at the Large Hadron Collider; possible use of psychoactive substances in the Late Pleistocene; and an intriguing technical description of a telescope attributed to Galileo.
Physicists believe dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of matter in our universe, with the strongest (but not only) candidate being so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). But directly detecting WIMPs, or other alternative hypothetical dark matter particles, has eluded physicists for decades. We might have our first glimpse, however, courtesy of the LUX-ZEPLIN detector buried deep in a gold mine in South Dakota. Those potentially exciting results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan, with a preprint available on the arXiv. (It has been submitted to Physical Review Letters for peer review.)
The announcement came with strong caveats: the signal is just a hint, well below the threshold needed to confirm discovery, and might just be a statistical fluke. Anyone who regularly follows dark matter news knows that past tantalizing anomalies evaporated as more data came in. But the LUX-ZEPLIN team was unable to account for this event and decided to report their result to the broader physics community. They are still collecting data, as is the XENONnT at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. And China’s PandaX detector is currently being built.
If it turns out to be a WIMP that struck a xenon nucleus, it’s not what physicists would predict. The event had a higher nuclear recoil energy than expected, which means the detector should have also picked up several lower-energy WIMPs; it did not. That has theoreticians scrambling to come up with alternative models. Perhaps the interaction rate increases with collision energy. Or perhaps WIMPs have an internal structure, like an atom, and only interact if hit hard enough. Or its coupling to ordinary matter could depend on its momentum.
arXiv, 2026. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2609.02823 (About DOIs).
Cornell University physicist N. David Mermin once described quantum entanglement as “the closest thing we have to magic,” since it means that disturbances in one part of the universe can instantly affect distant other parts of the universe, somehow bypassing the cosmic speed-of-light limit. Albert Einstein memorably dubbed it “spooky action at a distance.” Today, entanglement is the foundation for quantum computing and next-generation sensors, among other applications.
Maintaining quantum entanglement is usually a delicate process; any interference can cause entangled particles to decohere quickly. Despite this, in 2023, physicists found evidence of entanglement between pairs of top quarks produced at the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS experiment, raising the possibility that large colliders could be used as an investigative tool to study spooky action at a distance. Now ATLAS physicists have observed entanglement in pairs of Z bosons, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Z bosons are produced when a Higgs boson decays and are themselves extremely short-lived particles, decaying into pairs of electrons and muons. The ATLAS detector precisely tracks those decay patterns. The physicists used that data to reconstruct the angles at which electrons and muons were emitted to infer the spins of the original Z bosons that preceded them. The authors claim that this is the highest-energy example of entanglement observed to date
Physical Review Letters, 2026. DOI: Physical Review Letters.