| No 4 TCU can back up title talk vs No 16 Utah

No.-4-TCU-can-back-up-title-talk-vs.-No.-16-Utah FORT WORTH, Texas -Before fourth-ranked TCU can really start thinking about a national title, there is that trophy Utah currently has - the one kept from the Horned Frogs last season in heartbreaking fashion.

While TCU has become a national championship contender even without guaranteed access to the Bowl Championship Series, the Horned Frogs still have company atop the conference standings in the No. 16 Utes .

The two will play Saturday night in TCUs biggest home game in 25 years.

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The Utes are listed as a nearly three-touchdown underdog, but theyre not intimidated. And for good reason: Utah is the defending league champ and the team on the opposite end of TCUs long winning streaks.

TCUs 11-game winning streak began after a 13-10 loss at Utah last November. The Horned Frogs have also won 12 in a row at home since losing two years ago to the Utes.

Youre on the throne until somebody dethrones you. Were still the champions until somebody proves it otherwise, Utah receiver Jereme Brooks said. Its great. I like being the underdog.

Not only are the Horned Frogs trying to get the Mountain West title, theyre trying to get where Utah has twice been before. The Utes were the original BCS buster in 2004 and last year capped an undefeated season with a Sugar Bowl victory over Alabama while being the first outsider to play in two of the big-money bowl games.

TCU is fourth in the BCS standings, the highest ranking yet for a team from a conference without an automatic bid. The question is not whether the Frogs are this seasons BCS buster but can they be the first outsider to play for a national title.

The Frogs also have their highest AP ranking since 1956 and their first home sellout since Big 12 foe Texas Tech visited three years ago. The last time they had a higher ranking for a home game was at No. 1 during their undefeated 1938 national championship season with quarterback Davey OBrien.

All that stuff is great for the fans, great for alumni, our students, faculty and everybody us. For us, we have to focus in on the people that wear the red and black , coach Gary Patterson said. If we dont get it done, everybody will forget about it.

TCU players and coaches vividly remember Utah fans storming the field to celebrate a thrilling comeback and the tears in the locker room after last years game.

The Frogs had led 10-0 and outgained Utah 416 total yards to 275. But they missed two field goals in the fourth quarter and let the Utes drive 80 yards for the game-winning touchdown in the final minute.

Last year was a heartbreaker, to go in the locker room and see a bunch of guys in tears and all that. That sticks with you, said third-year starting quarterback Andy Dalton, a junior. Thats a feeling that you never want to feel.

That hurt would be exponentially worse if it happens again because the national title hopes would vanish.

Utahs BCS chances this season took an early hit with a loss at Oregon, but the Utes have since won six in a row.

The first thing we tell our guys, TCU is a very good football team. We respect them. Theyre hitting in all phases, Utah coach Kyle Whittingham said. The bottom line is weve played some good football this year as well.

The Utes found a new spark in freshman quarterback Jordan Wynn, who in his first start last week hit 18 of 28 passes for 297 yards and two touchdowns at New Mexico. He rested in the fourth quarter of Utahs best offensive showing of the season, 557 total yards and 45 points.

TCU leads the Mountain West with 37 points a game and matches BYU with a league-high 459 yards per game. Combine that with a defense that leads the league and is top-five nationally allowing 241 yards and 11 points per game, and its clear to see why the Frogs are one of the nations best teams.

Now if they could just get past Utah.

Our destiny is in our hands, Frogs defensive end Jerry Hughes said.

© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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} - | No 4 TCU can back up title talk vs No 16 Utah |

| New theory tries to explain missing matter

New-theory-tries-to-explain-missing-matter One of the greatest mysteries of astronomy is the problem of the missing mass: All of the matter scientists can see in the universe accounts for only a small percent of the observed gravity.

Astronomers often invoke the concept of dark matter to explain this discrepancy, but some researchers say the problem is really our understanding of gravity. These scientists tout an idea called MOND — Modified Theory of Newtonian Dynamics — to explain why the universe seems to behave as if theres much more matter in it than we think.

Instead of assuming that this missing mass exists in the form of dark matter, which scientists have yet to detect directly, MOND advocates say we must alter Einsteins general theory of relativity.

Under MOND, mass is much more effective at bending space-time than under General Relativity, so it takes less stuff in the universe to account for all the gravity we measure.

Fudge factor still needed
Though no one has yet proven or disproven either dark matter or MOND, supporters of the latter are in the minority. And MOND may be becoming even more of a long shot, according to cosmologist Pedro Ferreira of Oxford University in England. Ferreira wrote a review article in Fridays issue of the journal Science assessing the current state of MOND ideas.

My personal view at the moment is that dark matter is a far simpler theory than any of the modified theories that Ive seen, Ferreira said. Nonetheless, he said MOND shouldnt be discounted out of hand just because its the less popular idea, nor because many physicists are loathe to tamper with Einsteins general relativity.

Very few people have worked on MOND; a very large number of people have worked on dark matter, said Jacob Bekenstein, a physicist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who has researched MOND. To compare them is kind of silly because we dont really know enough of whether MOND is working well or not. Just too little effort has been going into MOND.

Bekenstein admitted that MOND was not yet a fully fleshed-out theory: It cannot make physical predictions on all scales of the universe.

When applied to just galaxies, MOND can predict very well the behavior that astronomers observe. But when MOND is applied to larger structures like clusters of galaxies, it fails. To make MOND work for clusters, it must include more complicated concepts, such as entities called dark fields, which are different from dark matter, but work in a similar way to alter the amount of gravity present.

It seems like if you want to build a proper theory of MOND, you bring in something like dark mater through the back door, Ferreira said.

This fudge factor seems to defeat one of the primary purposes of MOND when it was first proposed, which was to avoid having to invent a mysterious unseen entity acting in the universe, such as dark matter.

Even Bekenstein admitted that involving dark fields in MOND is not ideal.

If you work only on galaxies then MOND doesnt need any help, he told Space.com. But if you go up to clusters it needs some help. This is one of the things I hold against MOND.

However ...
Bekenstein pointed out that dark matter isnt perfect either. Thirty years after it was proposed, scientists have yet to find the stuff out there in the universe, and the idea isnt yet ideal at predicting all manner of situations, either.

In the models of galaxies with dark matter, you have to carefully adjust the distribution of dark matter, he said. Since you dont see the dark matter youre kind of free to adjust what you want, but its not very credible in my opinion. Its too free an idea.

Ferreira said some kind of answer may come soon with the advent of new satellites set to observe the distribution of mass in the universe more precisely.

I think things are going to really heat up over the next 10 years, he said.

- | New theory tries to explain missing matter |