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Video—What if there was a black hole in your pocket? Could you survive being close to a black hole the size of a nickel? Seriously though, how grisly would your death be and what would such a phenomena mean for the future of the Earth? A new video from the folks at Kurz Gesagt posted July 16 tries to answer those questions with some helpful animations. The video explores a few different assumptions, as the impact of the black hole would depend on whether its size was based on the mass or width of a nickel. Either way, if a...

Ten days after the three-year anniversary of CERN’s discovery of the Higgs boson, researchers on the LHCb experiment at CERN have announced that another discovery has been made: They have found a new exotic class of particles. The team has submitted their findings to the journal Physical Review Letters for reviewal. These particles are called “pentaquarks,” and they offer some interesting insights regarding the nature of, well, nature. Typically, we find that composite particles consist of three quarks. The proton, for example, is composed of three valence quarks: Two up quarks and a down quark. But in 1964, American physicist...

CSIRO's Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope. Credit: CSIRO A wisp of cosmic radio waves, emitted before our solar system was born, shows that a new radio telescope will be able to detect galaxies other telescopes can't. The work, led by Dr James Allison of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, was announced today (6 July) at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, north Wales. The finding was one of the first made with CSIRO's Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a new radio telescope 300 kilometres inland from the Western Australian town of Geraldton. The discovery...

Everything we know, and everything else besides, burst into existence at the Big Bang. Now scientists have concluded that we could be heading for an equally dramatic cosmic finale: the Big Rip. A new theoretical model suggests that as the universe expands, everything, from galaxies, planets and atomic particles to space-time itself, will eventually be torn apart before vanishing from view. There’s no need for immediate alarm, however: the extreme sequence of events is predicted for around 22 billion years from now.

Rice University has installed the Titan Themis scanning/transmission electron microscope, which will enable scientists from Rice as well as academic and industrial partners to view and analyze materials at angstrom-scale (one-tenth of a nanometer) resolution, about the size of a single hydrogen atom. Images will be captured with a variety of detectors, including X-ray, optical and multiple electron detectors and a 4K-resolution camera (will create 4K ultra HD images). The microscope gives researchers the ability to create three-dimensional structural reconstructions and carry out electric field mapping of subnanoscale materials. Electron microscopes use beams of electrons rather than light to illuminate...

Just as leap years keep our calendars lined up with Earth's revolution around the sun, leap seconds adjust for Earth's rotation. This kind of fine-tuning wasn't much of an issue before the invention of atomic clocks, whose ticks are defined by the cycling of atoms. Cesium-based clocks, one kind of atomic clock, measure the passage of time much more precisely than those based on the rotation of our planet, so adding a leap second allows astronomical time to catch up to atomic time. Most of us won't notice the addition, which happens at 23:59:59 coordinated universal time (UTC), or 7:59...

When Henri met Albert the stars didn’t quite align; nor did their clocks. Jimena Canales, historian of science, tells Joe Gelonesi about her discovery of an explosive 20th century debate that changed our view of time and destroyed a reputation.Physicists and philosophers have a curious relationship. They both need each other for the cosmic dance, but one partner sometimes refuses to join in. Star physicist Stephen Hawking even declared the end of philosophy in 2011. In some ways the pronouncement was to be expected; physics triumphalism dictates that at some point philosophy will exhaust itself and be unable to solve...

Cosmic Inflation’s Five Great Predictions A “speculative” theory no more; it’s had four of them confirmed. Image credit: Max Tegmark / Scientific American, by Alfred T. Kamajian. “Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.” -Paul Steinhardt, 2014 When we think about the Big Bang, we typically think about the origin of the Universe: the hot, dense, expanding state where everything came from. By noticing and measuring the fact that the Universe is expanding today — that the galaxies are getting farther apart from one another in all directions — we...

Einstein's theory of time and space will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year. Even today it captures the imagination of scientists. In an international collaboration, researchers from the universities of Vienna, Harvard and Queensland have now discovered that this world-famous theory can explain yet another puzzling phenomenon: the transition from quantum behavior to our classical, everyday world. Their results are published in the journal Nature Physics. In 1915 Albert Einstein formulated the theory of general relativity which fundamentally changed our understanding of gravity. He explained gravity as the manifestation of the curvature of space and time. Einstein's theory predicts that...

The idea is when mass moves or changes, Einstein said that there should be gravitational ripples produced in spacetime. Our problem is that the size and effect of gravitational waves is incredibly small. We need to find the most catastrophic events in the Universe if we hope even detect them. A supernova detonating asymmetrically, or two supermassive black holes orbiting each other, or a Galactus family reunion; are the magnitude of events we’re looking for. The most serious attempt to detect gravitational waves is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO detector, in the United States. It has two facilities...

Sir Isaac Newton...came to the realization that the math that had been used thus far to describe physical motion of massive bodies, simply would not suffice... Newton developed the Calculus in which this way of approaching moving bodies, he was able to accurately model the motion of not only Halley’s comet, but also any other heavenly body that moved across the sky. ... Newton recognized that Kepler’s mathematical equation for planetary motion, Kepler’s 3rd Law ( P2=A3 ), was purely based on empirical observation, and was only meant to measure what we observed within our solar system. Newton’s mathematical brilliance...

The bizarre nature of reality as laid out by quantum theory has survived another test, with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured. Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment, which involves a moving object that is given the choice to act like a particle or a wave. Wheeler's experiment then asks - at which point does the object decide? Common sense says the object is either wave-like or particle-like, independent of how we measure it. But quantum physics predicts that whether you observe...

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a mathematical genius who had his life chronicled in the movie A Beautiful Mind. One of Nash’s colleagues says that just days before he died in a New York taxi cab accident, he had discussed his latest and possibly most brilliant discovery to date. Mathematician Cédric Villan says that Nash told him that he had replaced Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and that the new equation would further explain quantum gravity. The Daily Mail reports that on May 20, 2015, just three days before the tax cab accident that would take his life, Nash spoke to...

ITER, the international fusion reactor being built in France, will stand 10 stories tall, weigh three times as much as the Eiffel Tower, and cost its seven international partners $18 billion or more. The result of decades of planning, ITER will not produce fusion energy until 2027 at the earliest. And it will be decades before an ITER-like plant pumps electricity into the grid. Surely there is a quicker and cheaper route to fusion energy. Fusion enthusiasts have a slew of schemes for achieving the starlike temperatures or crushing pressures needed to get hydrogen nuclei to come together in an...

Interstellar:Can You Do It?Circumnavigate the Many dimensions of Time, Space,Having Left Twenty Years Ago, Be Home For Dinner Tonight?http://endurance.interstellarmovie.net

In the center of most galaxies (ours included) there is a supermassive black hole that holds everything together. However, one galaxy 10.5 billion light years away looks like it might have two black holes, and just like in Highlander, there can be only one. Scientists believe the pair are going to crash into each other in just 21 years. This could provide an unprecedented opportunity to observe the mind-boggling physics of such an event. The galaxy in question doesn’t have a snazzy name — it’s known only as PSO J334.2028+01.4075. It’s what is known as a quasar, or an “active...

A new class of magnets discovered that swell in volume and generate little heat when placed in a magnetic field could be used to harvest or convert energy efficiently. Applications range from sensors and actuators for automobiles to biomedical devices, besides defence applications. Discovered by scientists at the University of Maryland (UMD) and Temple University, the new magnets made from abundant metal alloys could replace the expensive, rare-earth magnets which exhibit poor mechanical properties. Maryland professor of materials science and engineering Manfred Wuttig, and Harsh Deep Chopra, professor and chair of mechanical engineering at Temple heated certain iron-based alloys (iron-gallium,...

Astrophysicists have developed a new method for calculating the effect of Rayleigh scattering on photons, potentially allowing researchers to better understand the formation of the Universe. The CMB is the oldest light in the universe, which originated when electrons combined with protons to form the first atoms. These primordial atoms were also the first to Rayleigh scatter light. UBC theoretical cosmology graduate student Elham Alipour, UBC physicist Kris Sigurdson and Ohio State University astrophysicist Christopher Hirata probed the effect of Rayleigh scattering -- the process that makes the sky appear blue when the Sun's photons are scattered by molecules...

Who hasn't looked up at the star-studded night sky and wondered, "Where did everything come from?" There are many ways to address this question. It was Edwin Hubble whose telescopic observations of galaxies in 1929 led to the major discovery that the universe is expanding, and that the rate of expansion is proportional to how far the galaxies are from one another. The farther apart they are, they faster they are going. This result implies there was a time about 13.75 billion years ago when the universe began in an event we now call the Big Bang. The evidence suggests...

Owen Maroney worries that physicists have spent the better part of a century engaging in fraud. Ever since they invented quantum theory in the early 1900s, explains Maroney, who is himself a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, they have been talking about how strange it is — how it allows particles and atoms to move in many directions at once, for example, or to spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously. But talk is not proof, says Maroney. “If we tell the public that quantum theory is weird, we better go out and test that's actually true,” he says. “Otherwise...