Charlie Wood writes: In a sunny lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two starfish fought over their prey. Overlapping arms pinned a hunk of thawing cocktail shrimp against the side of the tank. Thousands of suction cups rippled furiously against the glass as each echinoderm struggled to inch the prize toward its own maw.… Read More »
Paul M Sutter writes: In 1654 a German scientist and politician named Otto von Guericke was supposed to be busy being the mayor of Magdeburg. But instead he was putting on a demonstration for lords of the Holy Roman Empire. With his newfangled invention, a vacuum pump, he sucked the air out of a copper… Read More »
Katie McCormick writes: Physicists believe they have detected a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky. If confirmed, the finding would point to features of the unknown fundamental laws that operated during the Big Bang. “If this result is real, someone’s going to get a Nobel Prize,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at… Read More »
Gene Tracy writes: I have a memory, a vivid one, of watching my elderly grandfather wave goodbye to me from the steps of a hospital. This is almost certainly the memory of a dream. In my parent’s photo album of the time, we have snapshots of the extended family – aunts, uncles, and cousins who… Read More »
Charlie Wood writes: Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it’s also expanding at an ever-so-slowly increasing pace, when naïve calculations suggest that — coming out of the Big Bang — space should have… Read More »
Thousands of galaxies seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. Nasa By Kazuya Koyama, University of Portsmouth and Levon Pogosian, Simon Fraser University Everything in the universe has gravity – and feels it too. Yet this most common of all fundamental forces is also the one that presents the biggest challenges to physicists. Albert Einstein’s… Read More »
Paul M Sutter writes: Like most physicists, I spent much of my career ignoring the majority of quantum mechanics. I was taught the theory in graduate school and applied the mechanics here and there when an interesting problem required it … and that’s about it. Despite its fearsome reputation, the mathematics of quantum theory is… Read More »
Motherboard reports: Scientists have opened an unprecedented window into the universe’s very first stars by conducting nuclear fusion experiments in a subterranean laboratory located 1.5 miles under China’s Jinping Mountains, reports a new study. The results resolve a longstanding mystery about one of the oldest stars ever discovered, while also shedding new light on the… Read More »
Science Alert reports: In the ongoing work to realize the full potential of quantum computing, scientists could perhaps try peering into our own brains to see what’s possible: A new study suggests that the brain actually has a lot in common with a quantum computer. The findings could teach us a lot about the functions… Read More »
Charlie Wood writes: More than a century after Ernest Rutherford discovered the positively charged particle at the heart of every atom, physicists are still struggling to fully understand the proton. High school physics teachers describe them as featureless balls with one unit each of positive electric charge — the perfect foils for the negatively charged… Read More »
Charlie Wood writes: A jarring divide cleaves modern physics. On one side lies quantum theory, which portrays subatomic particles as probabilistic waves. On the other lies general relativity, Einstein’s theory that space and time can bend, causing gravity. For 90 years, physicists have sought a reconciliation, a more fundamental description of reality that encompasses both… Read More »
Ben Brubaker writes: Predicting complex systems like the weather is famously difficult. But at least the weather’s governing equations don’t change from one day to the next. In contrast, certain complex systems can undergo “tipping point” transitions, suddenly changing their behavior dramatically and perhaps irreversibly, with little warning and potentially catastrophic consequences. On long enough… Read More »
Paul Sutter writes: Gigantic deserts of almost complete nothingness that make up most of the universe may be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up, new research suggests. That means these vast tracts of nothingness could explain dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be flinging the universe apart. Zoom all the… Read More »
Charlie Wood writes: Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, declaring that God could do anything, even create a vacuum. Then a mere scientist pulled it off. Otto von Guericke invented a… Read More »
Science reports: The James Webb Space Telescope has only been watching the sky for a few weeks, and it has already delivered a startling finding: tens, hundreds, maybe even 1000 times more bright galaxies in the early universe than astronomers anticipated. “No one was expecting anything like this,” says Michael Boylan-Kolchin of the University of… Read More »
Paul M. Sutter writes: Beginning in the 1970s cosmologists started to uncover the structure of the universe writ large. They already knew that galaxies occasionally clump together into clusters, but over even larger distances, spanning 100 million light-years and more, they found superclusters. And in between those superclusters they saw something even more unexpected: vast… Read More »