Strange News Round-up – November 5th, 2015

A Whole New Type Of “Stuff”

Physicists have discovered an entirely new, and rather weird, form of matter. It’s not a metal or plastic, but something called a “phase”.

This phase has its electrons ordered unusually, and then the science gets rather too involved for us to explain simply. The discovery was made while researchers were testing a new technique of measuring electrons inside crystals using a laser. The electrons inside crystals sometimes line up to create magnets, but this team from the California Institute of Technology have found a completely new arrangement – a matrix – and thus a completely new form of matter that could have important uses in superconductivity in the future.

Read more here.

Snake On Snake Action

If you want weird wildlife you head to Australia. And it’s from the Land Down Under that this eye-catching image of a snake munching its way out of another snake has come. Geoff Mitchell snapped the picture in Griffith, New South Wales. Reptile experts are as baffled as Geoff was. Snakes can’t chew, so there’s no way the black snake could have eaten its way to freedom. Sydney snake aficionado, Rob Ambrose, reckons the lucky black snake may have been saved when the battling pair were hit by a car.

Read more here.