As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Quantum Entangled Tardigrades?

tardigrade - deposit photos

Tardigrades — those microscopic, plump-bodied critters lovingly known as “moss piglets” — have been put through the ringer for science. The amazingly durable creatures have been shot out of guns, bathed in boiling-hot water, exposed to intense ultraviolet radiation and even (accidentally) crash-landed on the moon, all to test the limits of their impressive “tun” state — a survival mechanism wherein tardigrades curl up into shrunken, dehydrated balls and suspend their biological functions indefinitely in order to endure extreme environmental conditions. Now, researchers have exposed tardigrades to the coldest temperatures and highest pressures that moss piglets have ever survived — … Read more

What is the Multiverse?

multiverse - deposit photos

Multiverse theory suggests that our universe, with all its hundreds of billions of galaxies and almost countless stars, spanning tens of billions of light-years, may not be the only one. Instead, there may be an entirely different universe, distantly separated from ours — and another, and another. Indeed, there may be an infinity of universes, all with their own laws of physics, their own collections of stars and galaxies (if stars and galaxies can exist in those universes), and maybe even their own intelligent civilizations. It could be that our universe is just one member of a much grander, much … Read more

SPACE: Are Traversable Wormholes Possible?

Wormhole - Pixabay

Interested in scooting through a wormhole, the ultimate cheat-code through space and time? Perhaps you’d like to hop from star system to star system across the universe without breaking a sweat? But first, you’d better make sure your wormhole is traversable. “Any traveler trying to cross a wormhole that does not satisfy this will be crushed inside as the tunnel collapses,” João Rosa, a physicist at Aveiro University in Portugal, told Live Science. Rosa is attempting to virtually “build” a stable, traversable wormhole, one that can be safely crossed without the theoretical passageway collapsing or trapping its occupant. And he … Read more

SPACE: The Milky Way Is Warped

Milky Way - Pixabay

There’s trouble brewing at the edge of the Milky Way: New measurements suggest that a peculiar distortion of the galactic disk is hardly moving, contradicting earlier reports. As yet, nobody knows which finding will end up being correct. At stake are some key details in the structure and formation of spiral galaxies throughout the universe. Astronomers describe the Milky Way as a flat disk-shaped, double-armed spiral galaxy twirling and twinkling with stars. Yet since the mid-20th century, astronomers have known that this picture is partially wrong. Observations in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum first revealed that our galaxy’s … Read more

SPACE: What Are Dark Sirens, And Why Should You Care?

black hole - pixabay

In recent years, cosmologists have been faced with a crisis: The universe is expanding, but no one can agree on how fast it’s moving away from us. That’s because different ways of measuring the Hubble constant, a fundamental parameter that describes this expansion, have produced conflicting results. But a single, lucky observation of what are known as dark sirens — black holes or neutron stars whose crashes can be picked up by gravitational wave detectors on Earth but remain invisible to ordinary telescopes — could help resolve this tension. As the cosmos expands, galaxies in the universe move away from … Read more

SPACE: Astrophysicists Propose Existence of “Gravity Portals”

Gravity Portal / Tunnel / black hole - Deposit Photos

Astrophysicists have an idea that could help to solve two mysteries: the reason for the bizarre abundance of super-high-energy radiation shooting from the center of our galaxy and the identity of invisible stuff called dark matter that has perplexed the world since its discovery some 50 years ago. And the idea has a super-cool name: gravity portals. The idea goes, when two dark matter particles (whatever they are) get sucked into one of these portals, they obliterate each other and spit out shockingly strong gamma rays. This line of thinking can potentially explain why the galactic center — where dense … Read more

PHYSICS: Meet the Swirlon

school of fish - swirlon - Yay Images

Fish school, insects swarm and birds fly in murmurations. Now, new research finds that on the most basic level, this kind of group behavior forms a new kind of active matter, called a swirlonic state. Physical laws such as Newton’s second law of motion — which states that as a force applied to an object increases, its acceleration increases, and that as the object’s mass increases, its acceleration decreases — apply to passive, nonliving matter, ranging from atoms to planets. But much of the matter in the world is active matter and moves under its own, self-directed, force, said Nikolai … Read more

SPACE: Turns Out Dark Matter is Way Lighter Than We Thought…

dark matter - deposit photos

Scientists are finally figuring out how much dark matter — the almost imperceptible material said to tug on everything, yet emit no light — really weighs. The new estimate helps pin down how heavy its particles could be — with implications for what the mysterious stuff actually is. The research sharply narrows the potential mass of dark matter particles, from between an estimated 10^minus 24 electronvolts (eV) and 10^19 Gigaelectron volts (GeV) , to between 10^minus 3 eV and 10^7eV — a possible range of masses many trillions of trillions of times smaller than before. The findings could help dark … Read more

Is the Universe Expanding So Quickly Because of “Bumblebee Gravity”?

bumblebee gravity

Physicists have long assumed that the universe is pretty much the same in any direction, and now they’ve found a new way to test that hypothesis: by examining the shadow of a black hole. If that shadow is a wee bit smaller than existing physics theories predict, it could help prove a far-out notion called bumblebee gravity, which describes what would happen if the seemingly perfect symmetry of the universe isn’t so perfect after all. If scientists can find a black hole with such an undersized shadow, it would open the door to a brand-new understanding of gravity — and … Read more

Where are all the squarks and gluinos?

Large Hadron Collider - Deposit Photos

Supersymmetry is the idea that the fundamental particles of nature are connected through a deep relationship. This theory predicts the existence of brand-new particles in the world’s largest collider experiments. But according to a recent report, there have been no signs of supersymmetry, and the theory is looking a little shaky. The subatomic universe is composed of two fundamental kinds of particles, called the fermions (in honor of Enrico Fermi) and bosons (named for Satyendra Nath Bose). In essence, fermions are the building blocks of the natural world: the quarks, the electrons, the neutrinos. If you zoomed into your own … Read more