It's matter, but not as we know it. In July, an unexpected visitor appeared at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Dubbed the pentaquark, this peculiar particle represents a fundamentally new way to aggregate the basic building blocks of matter. Although not forbidden by our current understanding of how stuff comes together, it had never been conclusively spotted before. This sort of thing is music to Glenn Starkman's ears. A theoretical physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Starkman is banging the drum for a bold idea: that there are even more exotic configurations of ordinary matter out there just waiting to be discovered. His audacious proposal is to find traces of this oddball matter by various means, from exhuming data left in mothballed gravitational wave detectors and searching ancient minerals to deploying seismometers on the moon. He even argues that ordinary matter in extraordinary formations could solve one of the greatest cosmological mysteries of our time - dark matter.
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