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The future is dark, and I don’t mean the upcoming US elections, I mean that stars in the universe will eventually all burn out. They’ll clump together and form black holes. The black holes will evaporate, leaving behind nothing but a very thinly distributed, cold, and dark gas. And that’s how it will...
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A lab in Australia is building a new supercomputer that will for the first time both physically resemble a human brain, and perform as many op...
2024-01-13 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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When I was just about to log off for the holiday break, I saw these headlines popping up, saying that it doesn’t take muchto turn Earth into Venus with a run...
2024-01-12 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
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It’s hard to keep track of all the things that will supposedly fix climate change but won’t. Such as hydrogen, veganism, or quantum computing. Wait what? Yes, marketing quantum computers as miracle cure for climate change has not fallen out of fashion despite my many jokes...
2024-01-11 16:00:10 +0000 UTC View PostHot exhaust spews from NASA’s new 3D printed rocket engine. Image Cre...
2024-01-11 13:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
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We’ve heard that space debris is bad and the problem’s getting worse, but here’s a new thing to worry about. It could interfere with the earth’s magnetic field, which is our major protection from the highly energetic particles of the solar wind.
Space debris, aka sp...
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Researchers at the Georgia Institute for Technology have found a new semiconductor that’s a really good candidate for making computers faster and smaller than ever. Let’s have a look.
...
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What is better, planting trees or covering the same area of land with solar panels? A group of geoscientists from Israel just looked at this, and they say that solar panels come o...
2024-01-08 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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Will the world end? Someone asked me that on twitter. You might think I’m not the right person to answer that question, but hear me out.
The world as we know it depends on the laws of nature continui...
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Imagine you make a prediction for a discovery that wins the Nobel Prize. Your prediction turns out to be correct, and no one cares. This is what happened to these two physicists.
I am talking about a prediction from 2009, when Mikhail Shaposhnikov and Christof Wetterich calc...
Space debris illustration. Image: ESA
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There are a lot of bad arguments against nuclear power. For example, that it’d just be too simple a solution to climate change, we need to make the transition difficult and painful. That’s not a good argument because it’s not actually that simple to prevent further global warm...
2023-12-30 13:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
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Nuclear power is on a roll. In its latest success, Poland has authorized the construction of 24 small nuclear reactors at six sites across the country. A...
2023-12-24 13:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
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This video is all about Albert Einstein, yes, that guy again. Einstein is famous for his theory of general relativity. It’s taught us that gravity is not a force. And that’s probably the most misunderstood physics fact, ever. Like, even physicists get it wrong, all the time. Gravity is not a force. And since th...
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Scientists have long speculated that life didn’t begin on earth but in space. According to a new preprint, life could have come from intergalactic gas clouds, so let’s have a look.
The oldest confirmed traces of life are biostructures called stromatolites, that’s layer...
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2023-12-21 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
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I though, I have a talent for pissing off climate scientists, but I have to bow to Sultan Al Jaber who had climate scientists fuming for saying that there’s no science behind a fossil fuel phase out. He is, of course, entirely correct, which raises the interesting question w...
2023-12-20 16:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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Particle physicists in the United States have tried to come up with a strategy to revitalize their research area, and their ideas are… somewhat underwhelming. But let’s have a look.
Last week, a panel of scientists named the 2023-12-19 17:00:07 +0000 UTC
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The Brick is a boxy cloud of opaque dust at the centre of the Milky Way, which has confused scientists ever since its discovery 30 years ago. It just got even weirder.
Astrophysicists originally thought that the Brick was just full of dense gases, which would absorb light. But...
2023-12-18 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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IBM just announced they produced the first quantum processor with more than 1000 qubits and I got a lot of question about what this means, so let’s have a look.
Last week, IBM revealed the IBM Condor processor...
2023-12-17 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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Complexity. It sounds very sciency, doesn’t it. Everyone loves to talk about complex problems and complex systems, but no one has any idea what it means. I think that understanding complexity is THE biggest gap in science today. What do we even mean by complexity? What do we...
2023-12-16 13:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
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Today I have some really bad news. So, you know, grab a cup of tea, or maybe scotch. Ready? A new study says that climate change will make big parts of the world uninhabitable much faster than expected. And I think they’re making a very good point.
Have you ever wondered ...
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Last week, Virgin Atlantic chartered the world’s first-ever transatlantic flight powered by sustainable aviation fuel. Their Boeing 787 flight from London to New York was powered by a mix of waste oil and biofuel and intended to test the performance.
Sustainable Aviation Fuels, SAF for short...
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This is the maybe most surprising development in theoretical physics I’ve seen for a decade or so. A well-renown physicist is saying that there’s a mistake in a proof that dates back half a century, and black holes might not actually contain singularities.
The physicist ...
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Every scientific discipline has its holy grail, and the holy grail of physics is definitely quantum gravity. Quantum gravity is Einstein’s unfinished revolution, the missing unification of General Relativity and Quantum Theory. String theory is the best-known contender, and ...
2023-12-12 17:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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NASA has succeeded in a first test of its new deep-space communication technology, which you might one day use to check in on your son, who recently mov...
2023-12-12 12:15:00 +0000 UTC View Post
[This video seems to have upset some people. I'm not entirely sure why. First, this is totally a real paper that you can read yourself. Second, it's not like I support this idea. I merely found it an interesting argument. Probably even makes sense from a financial perspective.]
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A study just out from researchers at Durham University in the UK has found that reducing social media use doesn’t have much of an effect on people’s emotional life one way or another.
The question whether social media impacts mental health has been hotly discussed...
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You’ve all heard of bubbles, but have you heard of anti-bubbles? Me neither, but it’s a thing, as I just learned from this recent paper.
Bubbles are thin, closed membranes of liquid surrounded by gas both inside and out. An anti-bubble is just the opposite, a thin, close...
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The Swedish Karolinska Institutet near Stockholm has tested drones for delivering defibrillators in response to emergency calls, and the results of their trial are very promising.
