Tag: Science

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.