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Claudio Neves Valente, the suspect in the Brown and MIT shootings, had flashes of temper; former classmates describe him as confrontational and socially awkward Twenty-five years ago, two promising physicists graduated from a prestigious science university in Lisbon. On Monday, one gunned the other down at his home outside Boston after firing on a classroom of Brown University undergrads, authorities say. Claudio Neves Valente, the suspected shooter, once had a bright future. He graduated at the top of his college class, ahead of classmate Nuno Loureiro. But by the time Neves Valente confronted Loureiro at his Brookline, Mass., apartment building...

Authorities say the same suspect was responsible for Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University and the Monday night murder of an MIT professor in Brookline, Mass. At a news conference Thursday night in Providence, that city’s police chief Col. Oscar Perez identified the Brown suspect as 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente.At a separate news conference in Boston, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley said Valente, a Portuguese national, is also believed to be the gunman who killed MIT physicist Nuno F.G. Loureiro.Ted Docks, the Special Agent in Charge of Boston’s FBI field office, told the press a search warrant was...

Physicists have known since 1911 that electricity can flow without resistance in materials called superconductors. And in 1957, they figured out why: Under specific conditions, including typically very cold temperatures, electrons join together in pairs—something that's normally forbidden due to their mutual repulsion—and as pairs, they can flow freely. Electron pairs are named for Leon Cooper, the physicist who first described them. In addition to explaining classical superconductivity, physicists believe Cooper pairs bring about high-temperature superconductivity, an unconventional variant discovered in the 1980s. It was dubbed "high-temperature" because it occurs at temperatures that, although still very cold, are considerably higher...

Surprising discovery may offer clues to emergence of high-temperature superconductivityUPTON, NY — Magnetic studies of ultrathin slabs of copper-oxide materials reveal that at very low temperatures, the thinnest, isolated layers lose their long-range magnetic order and instead behave like a “quantum spin liquid” — a state of matter where the orientations of electron spins fluctuate wildly. This unexpected discovery by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland may offer support for the idea that this novel condensed state of matter is a precursor to the emergence of...

An incredible image captures the bizarre UFO–like ring floating above Possagno, a tiny town in the foothills of the Italian Alps. The photograph was taken by photographer Valter Binotto, who watched as the glowing structure flashed in the sky at 10:45 local time on November 17. A photographer has captured a baffling image of a red UFO–like halo floating over the small Italian town of Possagno This ring is likely a structure known as an 'emission of light and very low–frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources', or ELVEs for short. These are rings of red or green light created...

Bounties as high as $100,000 are being offered to contract killers for the murder of dozens of Israeli researchers, including some in the US, on the website of a hateful anti-Zionist group. “The Punishment for Justice Movement” website offers between $50,000 for murdering one of the Jewish academics listed — and twice that amount for the killing of “special targets” — claiming the high-achieving researchers are complicit in child murder. Home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and social media accounts were listed for at least 40 academics, according to The Jerusalem Post. The website offered a $2,000 USD as reward...

An artist’s impression of a large red star releasing a bright, explosive burst of light. Swirling red and orange patterns surround the star, suggesting intense activity. In the background, a smaller blue planet appears with a faint, wispy trail extending away from it, indicating its atmosphere being blown off. The scene is set against a dark space backdrop dotted with stars. Credit: Olena Shmahalo/Callingham et al. Astronomers have, for the first time, confirmed a colossal coronal mass ejection from a distant star, a blast so powerful it could strip the atmosphere from any nearby planet. Astronomers using the European Space...

Harvard physicists unveil system to solve long-standing barrier to new generation of supercomputers The dream of creating game-changing quantum computers — supermachines that encode information in single atoms rather than conventional bits — has been hampered by the formidable challenge known as quantum error correction. In a paper published Monday in Nature, Harvard researchers demonstrated a new system capable of detecting and removing errors below a key performance threshold, potentially providing a workable solution to the problem. “For the first time, we combined all essential elements for a scalable, error-corrected quantum computation in an integrated architecture,” said Mikhail Lukin, co-director...

Is every "now" the same? Does the past, present, and future all equally exist? Am I having a crisis? The Andromeda Paradox - When is "Now"? | 11:09 Kyle Hill | 2.64M subscribers | 1,021,227 views | August 7, 2020 Andromeda Paradox [YouTube search]

Why does energy disappear in General Relativity? 0:00 What is symmetry? 4:25 Emmy Noether and Einstein 7:33 General Covariance 11:59 The Principle of Least Action 15:29 Noether's First Theorem 18:24 The Continuity Equation 23:20 Escape from Germany 24:49 The Standard Model - Higgs and Quarks The Hole In Relativity Einstein Didn't Predict | 27:39 Veritasium | 18.4M subscribers | 8,522,299 views | April 14, 2025 Emmy Noether [YouTube search]

Astronomers recently spotted two unprecedented plasma jets blasting out of a supermassive black hole and into space beyond its galaxy. The two extremely powerful plasma jets are the largest ever seen, measuring 23 million light-years from end to end. This distance would cross approximately 140 Milky Ways arranged side by side. Researchers who spotted this unprecedented phenomenon called the pair of plasma jets “Porphyrion” after a giant in Greek mythology. The two jets originate from the top and bottom of the supermassive black hole and have the combined power of trillions of suns. What exactly are black hole jets? Black...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: * Time travel is deterministic and locally free, a paper says—resolving an age-old paradox. * This follows research observing that the present is not changed by a time-traveling qubit. * It’s still not very nice to step on butterflies, though. ======================================================================= In a peer-reviewed paper, a scientist says he has mathematically proven the physical feasibility of a specific kind of time travel. The paper appears in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Germain Tobar and Fabio Costa, both of the University of Queensland at the time of the paper’s publication, worked together on...

We often imagine our galaxy as a serene, spinning disk of stars, a celestial carousel of light against the black velvet of space. This comforting image, however, is an illusion. From our tiny vantage point, embedded within one of its spiral arms, we are only now learning that the Milky Way is a place of profound and dynamic movement, a living entity that breathes and shudders on a scale almost impossible to comprehend. The latest revelation, born from the unparalleled data of the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, is not just a wobble or a tilt, but a colossal,...

NATIONAL MOLE DAY We'll eliminate any visions of a burrowing creature celebration immediately; National Mole Day recognizes a special number in chemistry. Chemists and chemistry students mark the occasion each year on October 23rd. #NationalMoleDay More specifically, the celebrations take place between 6:02 AM and 6:02 PM. In the U.S., the time and date are written 6:02 10/23. The time and date are derived from Avogadro’s number. Avogadro's number is approximately 6.02×10^23. Hence, defining the number of particles (atoms or molecules) in one mole of a substance, one of the seven base SI units. A mole is a unit of...

Ireland has officially joined the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) as an associate member state. CERN is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world on the Franco-Swiss border, just outside Geneva. The main focus of activity in CERN is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-km (17-mile) underground ring in which protons are accelerated and collided into one another. Associate membership will allow Ireland’s researchers to participate in CERN’s scientific programs and will make Irish citizens eligible for staff positions and fellowships at CERN. …

Researchers make landmark advance in the quest to unlock virtually limitless clean energy from the same reaction that powers the stars On a former military airfield a few miles south of Oxford, a group of scientists are trying to bottle the sun. Not literally, of course — but their ambitions come close. Inside a four metre-tall, apple-shaped machine known as the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak Upgrade (MAST-U), they are attempting to recreate, control and ultimately commercialise the fusion reactions that power the stars. In the past few weeks, they have made landmark progress. Fusion is physics’ grand prize, promising a...

...Scientists have been keeping a close watch on those changes, both to ensure there’s nothing unexplainable by our current understanding, but also to compare 3I/ATLAS to both previous interstellar visitors as well as comets in our own solar system. A recent paper from European researchers describes how the changes in a particular material ratio in 3I/ATLAS’ coma fit with our current understanding of cometary geology.That ratio is the nickel to iron (Ni/FE) abundance ratio. It has been measured for two decades, including on twenty in-system comets as well as 2I/Borisov, the last known interstellar visitor our solar system had. However,...

A photograph of a black graphite disk floating above a stack of three, round magnets. (Credit: Adrian Skov (OIST)) Study shows how perfect magnetic symmetry can cancel energy loss. In A Nutshell Researchers at OIST built a 10-millimeter graphite disk that levitates and spins above a magnetic array inside a vacuum chamber. By arranging magnets in perfect circular symmetry, the setup cancels the eddy currents that normally slow conductors moving through magnetic fields. Even at one-billionth of Earth’s air pressure, the disk kept spinning with almost no slowdown; only tiny tilts or material imperfections created measurable friction. This ultra-stable, contact-free...

Chatter Points * A new model suggests dark matter and dark energy may not be real entities, but effects of changing physical constants. * Galaxy rotation curves from seven galaxies fit the model using one key parameter: a “turn-off density.” * The approach also explains supernovae, galaxy clusters, and the cosmic microwave background without exotic matter. * Challenges remain: galaxies are complex, and no direct evidence yet shows that fundamental constants truly vary. ========================================================================== A physicist at the University of Ottawa has published research suggesting the universe’s most perplexing mysteries — dark matter and dark energy, which together supposedly account...

Thunderbird, the University of British Columbia’s benchtop-scale particle accelerator and electrochemical reactor. (Photo: UBC) ************************************************************************* Researchers at the University of British Columbia seeking the energy grail of cold fusion—alias lattice confinement fusion or low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR)— used electrochemistry to load extra deuterium ions into a metal lattice and found a “modest” performance boost of 15 percent, compared with experiments without the electrochemical loading technique, according to the university. While the experiment is benchtop scale, with more energy input than gained, it is the first time that deuterium–deuterium fusion has been demonstrated using the technique, according to UBC. The results...