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Tech NewsCan Sapphire Crystals Capture Exotic Dark Matter?
Physicists often build experiments looking for a specific something. Maybe that something consists of dark matter, new kinds of particles, or new ways that particles might interact with one another. Other physicists are trying to use these experiments’ old data in new ways, to look for something other than that specific something. Confused? Here’s an … Continued
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Tech News
Nobel-Winning Physicist Worried About 100 Chocolate Coin Wager Over New Particles
Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek was optimistic back in 2012. After all, he’d just won a wager after scientists had just announced their Higgs boson discovery at the Large Hadron Collider particle physics experiment in Switzerland. He made another bet—but he’s doesn’t feel as confident today. Wilczek made his new bet with Swedish physicist Tord … Continued
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Tech News
Incredible Gravitational Technique Reveals Oldest Spiral Galaxy on Record
Galaxies didn’t always take on the beautiful spiral shape we’ve come to associate with Andromeda and our own Milky Way. Looking far away into deep space—and into the past—ancient galaxies mostly look like giant blobs. But thanks to gravity’s light-bending properties, scientists have spotted a confounding thing in the distance: what appears to be the … Continued
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Tech News
New Discovery Suggests Quarks Can Undergo Explosive Fusion Reactions
Our Sun is powered by a fundamental phenomenon whereby atoms combine to unleash tremendous amounts of energy. But atoms might not be the only things that participate in this explosive reaction. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider’s LHCb experiment recently discovered a new particle whose constituent parts required lots of energy to bind together. But … Continued
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Tech NewsStunned Scientists Detect Suspected Hidden Chamber Within Great Pyramid of Giza
Though they were constructed nearly 5,000 years ago, the Great Pyramids of Egypt are still packed with secrets. Using a technique that leverages the power of cosmic rays, scientists have confirmed the presence of a large empty space within Khufu’s pyramid—a void that’s signaling the presence of a possible hidden chamber. It’s tempting to think … Continued
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Tech News
Scientists Confirm Light’s Crazy Quantum Mechanical Properties in Space
Here’s the thing about quantum mechanics: it works on Earth, but how do we know that it works elsewhere—like in space? That requires testing it over and over again, building wild experiments that send particles all over the planet. After some new results, things still seem to check out. A key property of quantum mechanics—the … Continued
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Tech NewsSploidScience Helps Reveal Which Carnival Games Are a Scam, and Which Ones You Can Actually Win
The prizes, the lights, the sounds, and a quick-talking barker make it hard to resist playing carnival games, but is every game a fool’s bet? In his latest video, Mark Rober, an ex-NASA JPL engineer, breaks down the science of what makes some of these games so challenging, and others near impossible to win. For … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
Albert Einstein Proven Right on His Life Advice Being Worth More Than a Cash Tip
Physicist Albert Einstein, one of history’s greatest minds, has been proven right in the long term about a lot of things, like the continued success of his theory of general relativity to aspects of that theory which eluded detection for decades, like the existence of gravitational waves. Now he’s been proven right on his split … Continued
By Tom McKay -
Tech News
Watch Live as Physicists Discuss the Mysteries of Dark Matter at Gizmodo
We live in a universe filled with weird stuff that we don’t really understand: dark matter. Physicists have observed its spooky effects but have’t seen it directly. Even scarier: There seems to be around six times as much dark matter in the universe as regular matter. Tonight, we’ll be broadcasting a discussion on this mysterious … Continued
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Tech News
Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D Thesis Is Now Crashing Cambridge’s Website [Updated]
You might not want anyone to read the work you put together as a university student—I sure don’t. But we’re not Stephen Hawking, world-famous physicist, whose Ph.D thesis you can now read for free online. The University of Cambridge has made Hawking’s work, “Properties of Expanding Universes,” free for anyone, given extraordinary demand. After all, … Continued
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Tech News
These Two Scientists Say the Time Has Come to Redefine ‘Glass’
“Glass is an amorphous solid that flows like a liquid,” you’d probably say if you were asked to define the stuff. Is that true, though? What if I told you, for example, that the old myth, that old windows are thicker at the bottom because the glass has flowed a little bit, was false? Glass … Continued
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Tech News
Antimatter Property Beats Regular Matter After Scientists Make Incredible Precision Measurement
If physics were complete as-is, the Universe wouldn’t exist. All particles would have found their antiparticle pairs and annihilated into a burst of energy. Matter and antimatter look like exact mirror images of one another, after all. There’s no difference between a particle and its antiparticle partner aside from having the reverse value of some … Continued
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ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
Colliding Neutron Star Discovery Could Solve This Mystery About Our Expanding Universe
Today, physicists across the world celebrated as telescopes and observatories on Earth and in space captured a “kilonova.” Two neutron stars collided 130 million light years away, sending gravitational waves, x-rays, gamma-rays, radio waves, and light waves to the Earth. But these events also serve as a new kind of tool—a tool with the potential … Continued
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Tech NewsObservatories Across the World Announce Groundbreaking New Gravitational Wave Discovery
Vicky Kalogera, a Northwestern University physicist, took her week of much-needed vacation in Utah this past August. She promised her family she’d stay off of email for a week. It wasn’t a real promise, of course, but she was going to try. She’d arranged the perfect day for August 17. Her husband was going to … Continued
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Tech News
Experiment Confirms a Crucial Property of Electrons, Unfortunately
When it comes to physics, fewer things are more exciting than proving something wrong. Proving theories wrong has led to entirely new fields of study. The fruits that come from wrongness can be so rewarding that scientists devote a considerable amount of time to probing well-known theories, hoping to find a crack. But a team … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
Huge Gravitational Waves Discovery Gets the Nobel Prize It Deserves
The Nobel Prizes are important and all. But if you’ve been paying attention to physics for the past two years, this year’s prize is akin to saying “my beautiful dog has won the Good Boy prize.” We’re very excited, but we aren’t surprised. Today, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2017 Nobel … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
Scientists Just Made the First Super-Secure Quantum Video Call
A “quantum satellite” sounds at home in the James Bond franchise, but there really is a satellite named Micius with some truly quantum assignments. In this case, it helped the president of the Chinese Academy of Science make a video call. A quantum-safe video call. The Micius satellite has made the news several times this … Continued
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ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
A New Gravitational Wave Detector Makes Its First Discovery
Arguably the most exciting recent development in astronomy was 2016’s announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves, waves that literally ripple the shape of space itself, created by violent events like black holes colliding. But every gravitational wave discovery had always been done with only two detectors, meaning that scientists only knew what caused the … Continued
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Tech News
Scientists Resolve Mysterious Violation to Einstein’s Relativity
Even if you don’t know much physics, you probably know one of its core tenets: an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion. In fact, in a vacuum where there’s literally nothing to slow things down, things don’t prefer being at rest or in motion. This plays out … Continued
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ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
Mysterious Deep Space Radio Bursts May Be Surprisingly Common
Since their discovery in 2002, scientists have struggled to understand Fast Radio bursts—high-energy pulses that originate from galaxies billions of light-years away. Though only a handful of these radio blips have ever been detected, new research suggests they could be a ubiquitous fixture of the cosmos, flashing about once every second throughout the observable universe. … Continued