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Artist’s impression of the collision between the early Earth and Theia. Since Theia originated in the inner Solar System, in this perspective the Sun can be seen in the background. (Credit: MPS / Mark A. Garlick) In A Nutshell * Inner Solar System origins: By measuring iron isotopes in Moon rocks and meteorites, researchers determined Theia probably formed closer to the Sun than Earth did, not in the distant outer Solar System. * Identical twins: Earth and the Moon have virtually identical chemical signatures, but both fall outside the range of any meteorites we’ve found—suggesting they incorporated exotic material from...

“The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.”- Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist) Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistryI. Prigogine, N. Gregair, A. Babbyabtz, Physics Today 25, pp. 23-28“The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly. You see,” Davies adds, “even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the...

I got a lot of questions last week about an article in Quanta Magazine about Dark Dimensions. it's about an idea motivated by string theory that combines large extra dimensions with dark matter. I had a look at the paper.The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.05318The article in quanta magazine is here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/...String theory nonsense makes comeback | 8:12Sabine Hossenfelder | 1.13M subscribers | 147,734 views | February 7, 2024

In the early evening of Sunday, October 7, 1900 - 120 years ago - Max Planck found the functional form of the curve that we now know as the Planck distribution of black-body radiation. By my account, it was the birthdate of quantum mechanics. [In Comment #1 - a beautiful photo of Planck, Einstein, and Millikan at a dinner party]

The dynamics of electrons change ever so slightly on each interaction with a photon. Physicists at ETH Zurich have now measured such interplay in its arguably purest form—by recording the attosecond-scale time delays associated with one-photon transitions in an unbound electron. The photoelectric effect, whereby photons impinging on matter cause the emission of electrons, is one of the quintessential effects of quantum mechanics. Einstein famously explained the key mechanism underlying the phenomenon in 1905, earning him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. He built on a concept introduced five years earlier by Max Planck: Electromagnetic energy is absorbed and emitted...

First Draft of the Neandertal Genome Sequence Released by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.* The highly anticipated initial draft assembly of the Neandertal genome was announced at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in the United States and at a European press conference.1 This genomic milestone involves approximately 3 billion bases of ancient human (Neandertal) DNA sequenced so far, which is the same amount of DNA contained in one set of human chromosomes or a single genome coverage. This is a major event in the booming scientific field referred to as “paleogenomics,” a discipline that...