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We trust the scientists around us to have the best grasp on how the world actually works. So at this year's 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History, which addressed the question of whether the universe is a simulation, the answers from some panelists may be more comforting than the responses from others. Physicist Lisa Randall, for example, said that she thought the odds that the universe isn't "real" are so low as to be "effectively zero." A satisfying answer for those who don't want to sit there puzzling out what it would mean for...

Cancel your plans for this weekend! CERN just dropped 300 terabytes of hot collider data on the world and you know you want to take a look. Kati Lassila-Perini, a physicist who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid (!) detector, gave a refreshingly straightforward explanation for this huge release. “Once we’ve exhausted our exploration of the data, we see no reason not to make them available publicly,” she said in a news release accompanying the data. “The benefits are numerous, from inspiring high school students to the training of the particle physicists of tomorrow. And personally, as CMS’s data preservation...

Explanation: Can one galaxy hide behind another? Not in the case of SDP.81. Here the foreground galaxy, shown in blue in an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, acts like a huge gravitational lens, pulling light from a background galaxy, shown in red in an image taken in radio waves by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), around it, keeping it visible. The alignment is so precise that the distant galaxy is distorted into part of a ring around the foreground galaxy, a formation known as an Einstein ring. Detailed analysis of the gravitational lens distortions indicate that a...

Nanotube wires self-assemble under the influence of a directed electric field from the Tesla coil. Credit: Jeff Fitlow ======================================================================================================== Scientists at Rice University have discovered that the strong force field emitted by a Tesla coil causes carbon nanotubes to self-assemble into long wires, a phenomenon they call "Teslaphoresis." The team led by Rice chemist Paul Cherukuri reported its results this week in ACS Nano. Cherukuri sees this research as setting a clear path toward scalable assembly of nanotubes from the bottom up. The system works by remotely oscillating positive and negative charges in each nanotube, causing them to chain together...

CLEVELAND, Ohio – April 4, 2016 wins a triple crown in the department of cosmic coincidences. The day marks Major League Baseball's Opening Day, the NCAA basketball championship and Square Root Day. All provide potential fodder for math geeks who scrupulously compile baseball stats, slaved over Sweet 16 and Final 4 basketball playoff match-ups, and appreciate a date when both the month and date are the square root of the year's last two digits (4,4,16).

When you think of magnets you probably imagine being a kid in class playing with them for the first time, figuring out that forces we can’t see have the ability to manipulate physical objects. We can make things affected by the magnetic waves, but not until recently have we been able to “program” them. A highly innovative company from Alabama have introduced to the world “Polymagnets,” and they’re incredible. They’re guaranteed to be one of the coolest things you see today!

When Max Born addressed the South Indian Science Association in November 1935, it was a time of great uncertainty in his life. The Nazi Party had already suspended the renowned quantum mechanics physicist's position at the University of Gottingen in 1933. He had been invited to teach at Cambridge, but it was temporary. Then, the Party terminated his tenure at Gottingen in the summer of 1935. Born took up an offer to work with C. V. Raman and his students for six months at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. While there, he found that his family had lost...

Artist's illustration of turbulent winds of gas swirling around a black hole. Some of the gas is spiraling inward, but some is being blown away. Credit: NASA, and M. Weiss (Chandra X -ray Center) ============================================================================================================================================== New research led by astrophysicists at York University has revealed the fastest winds ever seen at ultraviolet wavelengths near a supermassive black hole. "We're talking wind speeds of 20 per cent the speed of light, which is more than 200 million kilometres an hour. That's equivalent to a category 77 hurricane," says Jesse Rogerson, who led the research as part of his PhD thesis in...

Cosmic rays fired at Earth - now we know where from The violent region at the centre of our galaxy is the prime candidate, after gamma ray analysis, Bill Condie reports. Photo montage of gamma-rays as measured by the HESS array on the night sky over Namibia, with one of the small HESS telescopes in the foreground. Credit: H.E.S.S. Collaboration, Fabio Acero and Henning Gast Astronomers believe they may have identified the source of the stream of cosmic rays that rain down on Earth from outer space. Cosmic rays are extremely high-energy particles such as protons and atomic nuclei....

Mysterious high-energy particles known as cosmic rays zip through space at a wide range of energies, some millions of times greater than those produced in the world’s most powerful atom smasher. Scientists have long thought cosmic rays from inside our galaxy come from supernova explosions, but a new study has fingered a second source: the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. With this new result, the search for cosmic ray origins, which has frustrated scientists for more than 100 years, has taken an unexpected new twist. “It’s very exciting,” says astrophysicist Andrew Taylor of the Dublin...

upermassive black holes are the most extreme objects in the known universe, with masses millions or even billions of times the mass of our sun. Now astronomers have been able to study one of these behemoths inside a strange, distant quasar and they’ve made an astonishing discovery — it’s spinning one-third the speed of light. Studying a supermassive black hole some 3.5 billion light-years away is no easy feat, but this isn’t a regular object: it’s a quasar that shows quasi-periodic brightening events every 12 years or so — a fact that has helped astronomers reveal its extreme nature. Quasars...

Comprised of a lone hexagonal honeycomb lattice layer of tightly packed carbon atoms, graphene is one of the strongest, lightest, and most conductive compounds ever discovered. Bottom line, it's an extraordinary composite. However, a scientist from New York's Clarkson University says he's found a way to manufacture hemp waste into a material "better than graphene." Moreover, the scientist -- known to his peers as Dr. David Mitlin -- says creating this graphene-like hemp material costs but a minuscule fraction of what it takes to produce graphene. Presented at an American Chemical Society Meeting in San Francisco, Dr. Mitlin described how...

Happy Pi Day! No, not National Pie Day. That's January 23. On this day, geeks go wild at the mere thought of celebrating pi — the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. pi = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795 or 3.14 for short.

Using a series of laser beams, a pair of German scientists successfully teleported classical information without the transfer or matter or energy. Researchers have previously demonstrated local teleportation within the world of quantum particles. But the latest experiment successfully translates the phenomenon for classical physics. "Elementary particles such as electrons and light particles exist per se in a spatially delocalized state," Alexander Szameit, a professor at the University of Jena, explained in a press release. In other words, these particles can be in two places at the same time. "Within such a system spread across multiple locations, it is possible...

Farthest Galaxy Yet Smashes Cosmic Distance Record By Calla Cofield, Space.com Staff Writer March 3, 2016 04:45pm ET MORE Please upgrade your Flash Plugin The Hubble Space Telescope just calculated the distance to the most far-out galaxy ever measured, providing scientists with a look deep into the history of the universe. The far-away galaxy, named GN-z11, existed a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang, or about 13.3 billion years ago. Because the light from such a distant galaxy must travel huge distances to reach Earth, scientists are seeing the galaxy as it looked over 13 billion years ago....

[S]cientists...for some time now, they have been working with a model that states that the Universe consists of 4.9% “normal” matter (i.e. that which we can see), 26.8% “dark matter” (that which we can’t), and 68.3% “dark energy”. From what they have observed, scientists have also concluded that the normal matter in the Universe is concentrated in web-like filaments, which make up about 20% of the Universe by volume. But a recent study performed by the Institute of Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria has found that a surprising amount of normal matter may live...

In tunnels deep inside a granite mountain at Daya Bay, a nuclear reactor facility some 55 kilometers from Hong Kong, sensitive detectors are hinting at the existence of a new form of neutrino, one of nature's most ghostly and abundant elementary particles. Neutrinos, electrically neutral particles that sense only gravity and the weak nuclear force, interact so feebly with matter that 100 trillion zip unimpeded through your body every second. They come in three known types: electron, muon and tau. The Daya Bay results suggest the possibility that a fourth, even more ghostly type of neutrino exists - one more...

Now that LIGO has detected their first gravitational wave signal, the part of Einstein's theory that predicts that the fabric of space itself should have ripples and waves in it has been confirmed. This brings up all sorts of interesting questions, including this one from reader (and Patreon supporter!) Joe Latone, who asks: "Are gravity waves expected to exhibit wave-particle duality, and if so, have LIGO physicists already conceived of ways to test it, like the double-slit experiment?" It started out simply enough: matter was made of particles, things like atoms and their constituents, and radiation was made of waves....

"God is a pure mathematician!" declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.03599913. Let me explain. When scientists measure any quantity they must specify the units being used. The speed of light, for example, is either 186,000 or 300,000 depending on whether it is expressed as miles per second or kilometres per second. Likewise your weight might be 150 or 68 according to whether you are measuring in pounds or kilograms. Without knowing the units being...

One of the most spectacular discoveries of the 20th century was that the Universe itself was expanding. When Einstein put forth his general theory of relativity, he swiftly recognized that there was a consequence he was unhappy about: a Universe that was filled with matter in all directions would be unstable against gravitational collapse. Einstein’s fix for this was to make up an invisible, outward-pushing force that prevented this collapse from occurring, a cosmological constant. But if you didn’t include this cosmological constant, others soon realized, you’d wind up with a Universe that wasn’t static in time, but where the...