Discover 1-2

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AUÐUNN NÍELSSON

Valhalla or Bust

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ARCHAEOLOGISTS STRUCK GOLD — or at

least iron, silver and bronze — in Dysnes, a

town along a northern Iceland fjord, in June.

Six Viking Age graves, two of them boat burials,

held both human and animal remains, including

horses and a dog. The dig also uncovered roughly

1,000-year-old spears, swords, whetstones and

jewelry. Among sites unearthed nearby over the past

century, “Dysnes takes the prize — for the boats, the

weapons, and the size and scale and complexity,” says

archaeologist and dig team member Howell Roberts.

— GEMMA TARLACH

Ticking Time Crystals

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IN 2012, NOBEL LAUREATE

Frank Wilczek envisioned a

new kind of matter based on

a crystal. The ordered framework

of a crystal is basically a pattern

of atoms that repeats in space. In

Wilczek’s time crystals, motion also

repeats. Imagine a material with

millions of electrons (or tiny bar

magnets, if it’s easier to picture)

flipping back and forth in unison,

like a crystalline clock.

Some physicists thought it sounded

ridiculous, but now two groups have

created versions of the matter in

their labs, publishing a pair of papers

in Nature in March. At the University

of Maryland, 10 ytterbium ions flip

around regularly, and at Harvard, it’s

a million nitrogen atoms.

While the crystals would need to

last longer, their ticking could prove

a solid way to store information,

even possibly serving as memory for

quantum computers. Meanwhile, we

have a whole new kind of matter to

explore. — SHANNON PALUS

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