There may be nothing new under the sun, but something novel has definitely jumped out at physicists working in some of the coldest, darkest regions imaginable.

U.S. scientists recently announced that they had produced a new kind of matter. For those who think that there are only three types of matter -- gas, liquid and solid -- think again. What is known as a "fermionic condensate" is, by some reckonings, No. 6 on the matter charts.

It joins plasma, the gas-like state in which atoms have been torn apart and turned into ions and electrons. Plasma is the form of matter that constitutes the sun and stars. And there is Bose-Einstein condensate, which was first formed in 1995; its discoverers received the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics. This deeply frozen kind of matter exists at the same time as both a wave and a particle.

Which brings us back to fermionic condensate. It was created by applying a magnetic field to a cloud of 500,000 potassium-40 atoms that had been cooled to 50 billionths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. The potassium ion is part of a family of atoms that, because of their physical makeup, don't normally pair up.

But now they do, and that means they can . . . well, the discovery is so new physicists aren't sure. Maybe fermionic condensates will flow without resistance and become super-liquids. Maybe their behaviour will tell us something about why you can't make materials that conduct electricity without resistance above temperature of - 135 C. But most likely they will answer questions that we didn't know were questions until a new form of matter was discovered.

In the news

A study has found that American woman scientists are less likely to become involved in collaborative work than their male colleagues. At the same time, they experience the generalized angst of educated working women -- that is, 63 per cent find balancing work and family a challenge.

Portuguese research has suggested an evolutionary reason for baby fat. An analysis of 1,069 babies found a correlation between fatness at birth and a larger head size. Bigger heads have previously been linked to greater mental capacity in the young.

Much of Tuvalu, the Pacific island nation that is often called the canary in the mine of global warming, was partly submerged briefly this week. While this flooding was a function of high tides, it may be a harbinger of things to come. Experts have long argued that if sea levels rise as glaciers and the pack ice melt, Tuvalu, which is only 4.5 metres above sea level, will be the first country where all its citizens have to be relocated.

Astronomers have found what they think is the most distant galaxy ever discovered. It is 13 billion light-years away, and apparently came into being a mere cosmological blink -- 750 million years -- after the Big Bang.

On the Web

In an age obsessed with health and food, it is worth pondering what we can learn about eating habits from what the eaters leave behind.

At www.scirpus.ca/dung/dung.shtml, University of Alberta archeologist Alwynne Beaudoin has produced a massive database cataloguing studies done on fossilized feces (coprolites) as well as other excrement remains deposited by various creatures.

We learn not just which spices and herbs were being consumed by humans in the Israel of sixth and seventh century BC, but who was getting tapeworms and whipworms and from what sources.

But the listing isn't exclusive to humans. What's in bee's excrement is described, as well as the fact that early domesticated cows in Switzerland seemed to have been fed fir branches instead of hay during the winter.

My favourite study on the site is an analysis of the dung remains found in a military latrine in Quebec City in June of 1853. Apparently, the soldiers and engineers who used it spent much of their time gorging themselves on a delight of an early Canadian summer -- wild strawberries.