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[T]ime has often been considered as the fourth dimension of space, with three spatial dimensions where one can go up or down, left or right, or forward or backward. But two new papers published in the journal Nature suggest that there might be a fourth spatial dimension, one that could possibly suggest previously undiscovered directions of motion. As detailed in a report from Gizmodo, two separate teams of researchers created their own two-dimensional setups, with one team using ultra-cold atoms and the other one working with waves of light. While the studies produced varying results, the findings complemented each other,...

A laser-driven technique for creating fusion that dispenses with the need for radioactive fuel elements and leaves no toxic radioactive waste is now within reach, say researchers. Dramatic advances in powerful, high-intensity lasers are making it viable for scientists to pursue what was once thought impossible: creating fusion energy based on hydrogen-boron reactions. And an Australian physicist is in the lead, armed with a patented design and working with international collaborators on the remaining scientific challenges. In a paper in the scientific journal Laser and Particle Beams today, lead author Heinrich Hora from the University of New South Wales in...

We're about to see — for the very first time — the event horizon of a black hole, proving beyond any last vestige of doubt that Einstein’s interstellar monsters are real. And here’s what it will look like.

Up for Grabs In Science, When 'Anything Goes,' Everything Goesby Denyse O'Leary Family values activist Austin Ruse's new book, Fake Science: Exposing the Left's Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data (Regnery, 2017), offers a look at a world growing increasingly hostile to evidence-based reasoning. We have not discovered better reasoning methods; rather, many people seem to have decided that reasoning is not relevant to our life together, and perhaps not relevant to the life of the mind generally. Ruse begins his book with a note about polls. Opinion pollsters claim that their work is a scientific enterprise. But in...

Black holes are famous for their muscle: an intense gravitational pull known to gobble up entire stars and launch streams of matter into space at almost the speed of light. It turns out the reality may not live up to the hype. In a paper published today in the journal Science, University of Florida scientists have discovered these tears in the fabric of the universe have significantly weaker magnetic fields than previously thought. A 40-mile-wide black hole 8,000 light years from Earth named V404 Cygni yielded the first precise measurements of the magnetic field that surrounds the deepest wells of...

Japanese netizens help scan lightning for gamma rays Japan -- A storm system approaches: the sky darkens, and the low rumble of thunder echoes from the horizon. Then without warning... Flash! Crash! -- lightning has struck. This scene, while familiar to anyone and repeated constantly across the planet, is not without a feeling of mystery. But now that mystery has deepened, with the discovery that lightning can result in matter-antimatter annihilation. In a collaborative study appearing in Nature, researchers from Japan describe how gamma rays from lightning react with the air to produce radioisotopes and even positrons -- the antimatter...

The finding keeps open the possibility that the particles come from dark matter New observations of the whirling cores of dead stars have deepened the mystery behind a glut of antimatter particles raining down on Earth from space. The particles are antielectrons, also known as positrons, and could be a sign of dark matter — the exotic and unidentified culprit that makes up the bulk of the universe’s mass. But more mundane explanations are also plausible: Positrons might be spewed from nearby pulsars, the spinning remnants of exploded stars, for example. But researchers with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or...

The Milky Way, just like every galaxy in the cosmos, moves. While everything in the universe is constantly moving because the universe itself is expanding, since the 1970s astronomers have known of an additional motion, called peculiar velocity. This is a different sort of flow that we seem to be caught in. The Local Group of galaxies — a collection that includes the Milky Way, Andromeda and a few dozen smaller galactic companions — moves at about 600 kilometers per second with respect to the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. Over the past few decades, astronomers have tallied up...

WASHINGTON – Top scientists in Israel are on the verge of a revolutionary breakthrough, creating a cloak that can render a person invisible. In their real-world quest for invisibility, scientists at Ben-Gurion University have developed a device that scatters light away from an object so it cannot be detected, making the object invisible to the eye. Physicists developed the method for concealing objects based on the study of “metamaterials,” which focuses on exploiting and controlling light by examining how it interacts with objects. Those arrays of minuscule components bend, scatter, transmit or otherwise shape electromagnetic radiation in ways that no...

The recent finding, detailed in the journal Science today (Nov. 17), concerns positrons, the antimatter complements of electrons. High-energy particles, usually protons, traveling across the galaxy can create pairs of positrons and electrons when they interact with dust and gas in space, study co-author Hao Zhou, at Los Alamos National Lab, told Space.com. In 2008, the space-based PAMELA detector measured unexpectedly high numbers of earthbound positrons. This was about 10 times what they were expecting to see, according to Zhou. ... Zhou's team made detailed measurements of the gamma-rays coming from the direction of two nearby pulsars — Geminga and its companion...

Bit by qubit, scientists are edging closer to the realm where quantum computers will reign supreme.IBM is now testing a prototype quantum processor with 50 quantum bits, or qubits, the company announced November 10. That’s around the number needed to meet a sought-after milestone: demonstrating that quantum computers can perform specific tasks that are beyond the reach of traditional computers. Unlike standard bits, which represent either 0 or 1, qubits can indicate a combination of the two, using what’s called a quantum superposition. This property allows quantum computers to perform certain kinds of calculations more quickly. But because quantum bits...

Voevodsky’s friends remember him as constitutionally unable to compromise on the truth — a quality that led him to produce some of the most important mathematics of the 20th century. Vladimir Voevodsky at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2016. In math as in life, Vladimir Voevodsky played by his own rules. Voevodsky, a Russian-born mathematical prodigy, produced a string of daring insights in the 1990s that revolutionized one of the central fields of mathematics and established him at the pinnacle of his profession. His work continues to reverberate today. On Sept. 30, Voevodsky died in Princeton, New Jersey, at...

Supernova iPTF14hls was unremarkable when first detected by a partner telescope in San Diego on Sept. 22, 2014. The light spectrum was a textbook example of a Type II-P supernova, the most common type astronomers... The observatory was in the middle of a 7.5-year collaborative survey, so Arcavi focused on more-promising objects. But in February, 2015... a student working for Arcavi that winter, noticed the object had become brighter over the past five months. "He showed me the data," Arcavi said, "and he [asked], 'Is this normal?' and I said, 'Absolutely not. That is very strange. Supernovae don't do that,'"...

David Coulter was in Copenhagen when he got an email that catapulted him into the stars. Coulter, 36, is a self-taught programmer. He spent 10 years in industry jobs, then left for graduate studies in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, which operates Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. “I just wanted to learn about outer space,” he said. He picked the right place. The second-year grad student found himself on a team that was the first to take images of neutron stars merging, beating a group from Harvard, perhaps explaining the origin of metals such as gold and uranium....

Study found elementary particles called quarks release energy when fused Certain types can produce eight times more energy than hydrogen fusion It's so powerful that the researchers at first hesitated to publish the work

At 28, Peter Scholze is uncovering deep connections between number theory and geometry. In 2010, a startling rumor filtered through the number theory community and reached Jared Weinstein. Apparently, some graduate student at the University of Bonn in Germany had written a paper that redid “Harris-Taylor” — a 288-page book dedicated to a single impenetrable proof in number theory — in only 37 pages. The 22-year-old student, Peter Scholze, had found a way to sidestep one of the most complicated parts of the proof, which deals with a sweeping connection between number theory and geometry. “It was just so stunning...

Scientists have subjected Albert Einstein's famous theory of gravity to its toughest real-world test so far—and it has prevailed. Einstein's general theory of relativity states that objects with mass cause a curvature in space-time, which we perceive as gravity. Space-time, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, is a four-dimensional fabric woven together by space and time. For example, a bowling ball causes a dent in a mattress, and that dent changes the otherwise straight motion of a nearby marble on the same mattress. Similarly, the mass of the sun distorts the space-time around it. A body with less mass, like...

America, Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible. And it seems America is in the lead. New technological breakthroughs from DOE’s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach and the only question is – when will the source of uranium for our nuclear power plants change from mined ore to seawater extraction? Nuclear fuel made with uranium extracted from...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A journey from Earth to Mars could eventually take just 39 days -- cutting current travel time nearly six times -- according to a rocket scientist who has the ear of the US space agency. Franklin Chang-Diaz, a former astronaut and a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says reaching the Red Planet could be dramatically quicker using his high-tech VASIMR rocket, .. The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket -- to give its full name -- is quick becoming a centerpiece of NASA's future strategy as it looks to private firms to help meet the...

In 2012, Mathematician Ian Stewart came out with an excellent and deeply researched book titled "In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World." His book takes a look at the most pivotal equations of all time, and puts them in a human, rather than technical context. "Equations definitely can be dull, and they can seem complicated, but that’s because they are often presented in a dull and complicated way," Stewart told Business Insider. "I have an advantage over school math teachers: I'm not trying to show you how to do the sums yourself." ... Stewart continued that...