Section: Science

Does the Rare Earth hypothesis still stand up in the age of exoplanets? The authors of a book on the subject they wrote 20 years ago still think so.

Quantum entanglement looks like the ideal candidate to achieve faster than light communication, but it turns out the universe has other ideas.

Some experts think our advancing technology might allow us to discover alien civilisation within the next two decades.

Scientists are excited by the discovery that muons are wobbling more than theory predicts. This could all point to the discovery of a new particle.

Scientists have been looking at the parts of the brain that are activated when people write computer code. Is it a language or mathematics?

Does quantum mechanics give an ‘out’ from the determinism of classical physics? Does it restore free will?

Scientists in Japan have been studying cats to see if they respond to human social cues like dogs.

An experiment that hoped to find quantised spacetime has so far come up blank. Space is smooth according to recent experiments in the field.

Scientists run a two-year experiment to look at the effects of Prozac on guppy fish and find it alters their behaviour in measurable ways.

Scientists have found that you can go some way to preventing cats from hunting wildlife by feeding them raw meat and playing with them.

A young physicist and his supervisor have worked out a way time travel might work without creating any of the paradoxes normally associated with it.

Multiverses are still a bit controversial but a couple of scientists have figured out how we might detect them if they do exist.

Do not seek refuge in shopping malls or pubs, say statisticians.

Parallax measurements from the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft confirm the universe is expanding faster than astronomers thought.

Scientists look for a message from God in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). They didn't find one, but I did.

A new paper suggests the outer planets will be dragged away from the Sun and wander through the galaxy after about 100 billion years.

A look at how the Relativity of Wrong applies to conspiracy theories and science.

A researcher has written a paper that might help whittle down the planets SETI should look at as part of its search for alien life.

The *Classification Theorem of the Finite Simple Groups* is a mathematical proof that runs to 15,000 pages. I applaud the people who got it down on paper.

An article on ArsTechnica about the real time operating systems they run inspire.

Physicists theorise that a pattern may exist in the distortions of the energy blips from some pulsars. Could a cosmic string be responsible?

NuScale gets US safety approval for its small nuclear reactor. It is however not as small as I first thought.

Virgin Galactic have made an aeroplane that will travel at three times the speed of sound. About time too.

A BBC article about the man who's looking out for asteroids and comets that may be heading our way and threatening all life on Earth.

The latest news from SETI is that there are 36 intelligent civilisations in the galaxy. Possibly. It’s all a bit limited by the sample size we’re using.

In an article on Quanta Magazine, four physicists mull over how naughty gravity can be and why we need a new theory to describe it.

Apparently we still view gains in a different way to losses and Prospect Theory still holds.

Warp drives aren't just the material of science fiction writers. Proper scientists are investigating them too.

How CP violation favours matter over antimatter, thus giving us the matter-dominated universe we see around us.

How getting rid of the law of the excluded middle in maths might help quantum theory and relativity find common ground.

There is some argument about whether the sterile neutrino is the source of the unidentified x-ray line and thus a candidate for dark matter.

A plain English description of how light can be both a wave and a bunch of particles, as proven by the double-slit experiment.

There is a cold spot in the Cosmic Microwave Background and cosmologists speculate as to why this might be.

I simply had to have an app that allows me to create new universes and base all my decisions on quantum mechanics.

A very simplified layman's view of the Schrödinger's cat paradox, where a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time.

A binary star system got too close to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy and one of its stars acquired phenomenal speed as a result.

Supermassive black holes are huge and incredibly heavy, so why doesn't their extreme gravity consume the entire galaxy?

For a long while scientists have thought the universe is flat but a recent paper suggests it's highly likely it is in fact curved.

People often confuse speed and velocity and thus end up confused about what acceleration is. This is a short explainer of those terms.

A simple explanation of what five sigma means. It is used as the level of certiainty required to class something as a discovery in physics.

Why haven't aliens visited us? This is the Fermi Paradox and I look at some of the reasons why this might be the case.

An article by Sean Carroll on Quanta Magazine looks at what quantum probability might mean. I provide an intro and then link to the article.

A Quanta Magazine article about a new measurement of the size of the proton. Previously they thought protons might shrink in the presence of a muon, but it turned out their original measurements of the standard proton were wrong.

A Quanta Magazine article about what happens at a cellular level during sleep. Apparently a process called phosphorylation helps us file memories.

Gravitational-wave detectors may have discovered a black hole of a mass that shouldn't really be allowed.

How cosmic distances are measured and why we need to use them to determine how fast the universe is expanding.

BBC report about how researchers at Exeter University have determined gulls are less likely to steal chips if they're being watched.

More than 100 years after Einstein proposed it, his General Theory of Relativity is still being tested. In this case, Einstein's 'Equivalence Principle' is put to the test.

A BBC article portraying the advantages of counting in base 12 rather than base 10 as we currently do.

An overview of the 1927 Solvay Conference, which could be the greatest meeting of minds the world has ever seen.

Pound for pound bats outlive most other species of mammals. ArsTechnica reports scientific findings on the matter.

A Quanta Magazine article about ideas that have sprung up as a result of the Shuttlecock Universe idea Hawking proposed in the 1980s.

The University of Cambridge has proposed a new form of currency that could be the future of stellar financial transactions.

An article on ArsTechnica looks at a new way to see whether the fundamental physical constants were different in the past.

Musing on the picture of the M87 black hole taken by the Event Horizon telescope array in 2019.

Gizmodo reports on a study that appears to show cats recognise their own names, although not all scientists are convinced.

'Eugene's Friend', a thought experiment that suggests measurements are relative, has be proven to be true.

To celebrate pi day one of Google's employees calculated its value to 31,415,926,535,897 digits.

A BBC article announces that Larry Page's flying car company is now training people how to fly them.

A look at the Drake Equation, which is used to estimate the number of intelligent alien planets currently residing in the Milky Way galaxy. I plug my own numbers into it to see what comes out.