Fast radio bursts are the focus of a young and fascinating field of astronomy. Researchers just released data on more than 500 new bursts, quadrupling the total number of detected events.
If emissions continue at their current pace, Antarctica will cross a threshold into runaway sea rise when today’s kids are raising families. Pulling CO2 out of the air later won’t stop the ice loss.
Fire a set of high-power lasers at a tiny speck of hydrogen isotopes and you can initiate nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun.
National Ignition Facility
Scientists are working on ways to make lots of energy by converting matter into energy. The trick is keeping the process under control. One possibility is nuclear fusion – the Sun’s power source.
Anything that moves or processes tiny amounts of fluid is a microfluidic device.
Chris Neils/Albert Folch
Electronics are not the only technology to have been miniaturized. Using the strange behavior of fluids in tiny spaces, microfluidic devices are critical to medicine, science and the modern world.
The Albert Einstein Archives at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
We first encountered the letter in 2019, when a reader shared it with us. In it, Einstein discusses bees, birds and whether new physics principles could come from studying animal senses.
Faster than light travel is the only way humans could ever get to other stars in a reasonable amount of time.
Les Bossinas/NASA/Wikimedia Commons
If humanity wants to travel between stars, people are going to need to travel faster than light. New research suggests that it might be possible to build warp drives and beat the galactic speed limit.
For 15 years, there has been a mismatch in physics. A particle called the muon wasn’t behaving the way theory predicted it should. A new theory and new experiment might solve this problem.
If the finding really is the result of new fundamental particles then it will finally be the breakthrough that physicists have been yearning for for decades.
In physics, entropy is the process of a system losing energy and dissolving into chaos. This applies to social systems in everyday life, too. Limiting energy loss can make social systems run better.
Could God travel faster than the speed of light?
robert_s/Shutterstock
Researchers have found a way to speed up the search for dark matter using technology from quantum computing. By squeezing quantum noise, detectors can now look for axions twice as fast.