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A lot of scientists think that major quantum effects like entanglement, in which particles separated by vast distances mysteriously link up their states, shouldn't work for living things. But a new paper argues that it already has — that scientists in 2016 have already created a sort of Schrödinger's cat — only with quantum-entangled bacteria. Usually, we describe quantum physics as a set of rules that governs the behavior of extremely tiny things: light particles, atoms and other infinitesimally small objects. The larger world, at the bacterial scale (which is also our scale — the chaotic realm of life) isn't...

Circling our galaxy is a stealthy giant. Astronomers have discovered a dwarf galaxy, called Antlia 2, that is one-third the size of the Milky Way itself. As big as the Large Magellanic Cloud, the galaxy’s largest companion, Antlia 2 eluded detection until now because it is 10,000 times fainter. Such a strange beast challenges models of galaxy formation and dark matter, the unseen stuff that helps pull galaxies together. “It’s a very odd object and kind of exciting because we don’t know yet how to interpret all of its properties,” says Andrey Kravtsov of The University of Chicago in Illinois,...

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California suspect that midsize black holes might be just the right size to provide enough gravitational force to reignite a dead white dwarf star — the stellar corpse of a star that's about the mass of the sun and that's used up its nuclear fuel. To test their idea, the team members ran supercomputer simulations of dozens of different close-encounter scenarios between these dead stars and midsize black holes. Every time a white dwarf got close to the Goldilocks black hole, the star reignited. The gravitational force from the black hole would cause the...

A feminist academic affiliated with the University of Arizona has invented a new theory of “intersectional quantum physics,” and told the world about it in a journal published by Duke University Press. Whitney Stark argues in support of “combining intersectionality and quantum physics” to better understand “marginalized people” and to create “safer spaces” for them, in the latest issue of The Minnesota Review.

‘Binary and absolute differences’ are ‘exploitative’ A feminist academic affiliated with the University of Arizona has invented a new theory of “intersectional quantum physics,” and told the world about it in a journal published by Duke University Press. Whitney Stark argues in support of “combining intersectionality and quantum physics” to better understand “marginalized people” and to create “safer spaces” for them, in the latest issue of The Minnesota Review. Because traditional quantum physics theory has influenced humanity’s understanding of the world, it has also helped lend credence to the ongoing regime of racism, sexism and classism that hurts minorities, Stark...

The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics.Fluids you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles...

Astronomers using the GRAVITY instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) have detected flares of infrared radiation coming from the accretion disk around Sagittarius A*, the 4-million-solar-mass black hole at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy. The flares the GRAVITY instrument detected provide long-awaited confirmation that the object in the center of our Galaxy is a supermassive black hole.The flares originate from material orbiting very close to the black hole’s event horizon — making these the most detailed observations yet of material orbiting this close to a black hole.While some matter in the accretion disk — the belt...

<p>Agency responsible with filling the government's coffers with cutting-edge tech is funding a controversial drive that's based on unproven science.</p> <p>The law of conservation of momentum says that a rocket (or anything else) can't accelerate forward without some form of exhaust ejected backward. But in 1998, a British engineer named Roger Shawyer announced the seemingly impossible—he had built a closed system that could generate thrust.</p>

Entanglement is one of the most confusing aspects of quantum mechanics — a field of physics that isn't exactly known to be clear-cut, sensible, common-sense and easy-to-understand.  Even Albert Einstein himself was flummoxed by the surprising behavior of microscopic particles, and he firmly believed that we were fundamentally misunderstanding the universe with quantum mechanics. It turns out that Einstein was wrong, but it's going to take a while to explain where he went wrong and what's really going on in the quantum realm. Head of state One of the most important lessons from quantum mechanics is that we have to...

Last year's mysterious outburst of deep-space light flashes was even more frenzied than previously thought, a new study reports. On Aug. 26, 2017, astronomers with the Breakthrough Listen project — a $100 million effort to hunt for signs of intelligent alien life — spotted 21 repeating light pulses called fast radio bursts (FRBs) emanating from the dwarf galaxy FRB 121102 within the span of 1 hour. Some scientists think FRBs come from fast-rotating neutron stars, but their source has not been nailed down. And that explains Breakthrough Listen's interest: It's possible that the bursts are produced by intelligent extraterrestrials, perhaps...

You may not have heard of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but, among anime fans at least, it’s a pretty big deal. Originally a series of light novels, it follows the adventures of typical high schooler Kyon and the time-travel alien ESP club he is forced to help create by his beautiful if eccentric friend, the titular Haruhi. Since its original run in 2003, it has spawned 10 additional volumes, a film adaptation, several video games, and even its own religion, Haruhiism. It was first adapted into an anime back in 2006. The show only lasted three months but there...

Scientists revel in exploring mysteries, and the bigger the mystery, the greater the enthusiasm. There are many huge unanswered questions in science, but when you're going big, it's hard to beat "Why is there something, instead of nothing?" That might seem like a philosophical question, but it's one that is very amenable to scientific inquiry. Stated a little more concretely, "Why is the universe made of the kinds of matter that makes human life possible so that we can even ask this question?" Scientists conducting research in Japan have announced a measurement last month that directly addresses that most fascinating...

Let's talk about dark energy. We've known for about 20 years that the expansion of our universe is accelerating; every day, our cosmos grows bigger and bigger, doing so faster and faster. It's a subtle effect, and it takes extensive and deep cosmological surveys and studies for scientists to notice it. But multiple independent lines of evidence all point to the same conclusion: accelerating expansion. Astronomers quickly cooked up a cool name for that accelerated expansion: dark energy. But now we’re left with the much harder job of finding a culprit — what's causing it? A universal mistake We use...

An amazing new Nasa image captures the youngest pulsar ever found by scientists. The pulsar - an ultra-dense chunk of a star leftover from its explosive death into a supernova - sits just 19,000 light years from Earth. It provides our best look yet at the early stages of star death, a mysterious and violent process that scientists still don't fully understand. The image was taken using Nasa's Chandra X-ray Observatory, an orbiting telescope that has been out of action for nearly two weeks following a catastrophic gyroscope failure.

Our best model of particle physics explains only about 5 percent of the universe. The Standard Model is a thing of beauty. It is the most rigorous theory of particle physics, incredibly precise and accurate in its predictions. It mathematically lays out the 17 building blocks of nature: six quarks, six leptons, four force-carrier particles, and the Higgs boson. These are ruled by the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces. “As for the question ‘What are we?’ the Standard Model has the answer,” says Saúl Ramos, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “It tells us that every...

Astronomers have discovered a massive proto-supercluster of galaxies -- bigger than even one million billion Suns. Scientists have called the ancient colossal structure Hyperion, the European Southern Observatory announced Wednesday. It is reported to have appeared just 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang, which took place about 13.7 billion years ago. The cluster's namesake is one of 12 titans born to the gods Gaia and Uranus in Greek mythology.

[R]esearchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter are reporting "ultrabright" electron sources with sufficient brightness to literally light up atomic motions in real time—at a time scale of 100 femtoseconds, making these sources particularly relevant to chemistry because atomic motions occur in that window of time. After seeing the first atomic movies of phase transitions in bulk thin films using high-energy (100 kilovolt) electron bunches, the researchers wondered if they could achieve atomic resolution of surface reactions—occurring within the first few monolayers of materials—to gain a better understanding of surface catalysis. So they devised...

Becoming a popular topic of study only within the past five years, superionic crystals are a cross between a liquid and a solid. While some of their molecular components retain a rigid crystalline structure, others become liquid-like above a certain temperature, and are able to flow through the solid scaffold. "When CuCrSe2 is heated above 190 degrees Fahrenheit, its copper ions fly around inside the layers of chromium and selenium about as fast as liquid water molecules move,"

-snip- Alessandro Strumia, the physicist in question and a professor at Pisa University in Italy, gave his presentation to a crowd at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), one of the word's most important nuclear physics organizations. The topic of the day was gender in physics, and the crowd was mostly composed of women, according to The Guardian. Over the course of several slides of his presentation, which are available online, Strumia laid out an IQ-based argument for disparities between men and women in physics. "Physics graduates have top IQ," he wrote. "It's needed." He pointed to a study that...

Columbia Engineering researchers have created the first flat lens capable of correctly focusing a large range of colors of any polarization to the same focal spot without the need for any additional elements. Only a micron thick, their revolutionary "flat" lens is much thinner than a sheet of paper and offers performance comparable to top-of-the-line compound lens systems. The findings of the team, led by Nanfang Yu, associate professor of applied physics , are outlined in a new study, published today by Light: Science & Applications. A conventional lens works by routing all the light falling upon it through different...