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In the early 17th century, the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon envisioned a bold, multiphase program to accumulate knowledge of the natural world. A critical part of this plan was Novum Organum, which celebrates its 400th anniversary this year. In this work, Bacon attempted to undo the centuries-old dominance of Aristotelian forms of inquiry, encouraging readers to instead apply inductive reasoning to carefully curated observations of the natural world. “Book One” of Novum Organum addressed why so little progress had thus far been made in understanding nature. Here, Bacon cautioned against “idols and false notions” that can interfere with...

Explanation: Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it. The huge monster, actually an inanimate series of pillars of gas and dust, measures light years in length. The in-head star is not itself visible through the opaque interstellar dust but is bursting out partly by ejecting opposing beams of energetic particles called Herbig-Haro jets. Located about 7,500 light years away in the Carina Nebula and known informally as Mystic Mountain, the appearance of these pillars is dominated by dark dust even though they are composed mostly of clear hydrogen gas. The featured image...

NASA scientists working on an experiment in Antarctica have detected evidence of a parallel universe — where the rules of physics are the opposite of our own, according to a report. The concept of a parallel universe has been around since the early 1960s, mostly in the minds of fans of sci-fi TV shows and comics, but now a cosmic ray detection experiment has found particles that could be from a parallel realm that also was born in the Big Bang, the Daily Star reported. The experts used a giant balloon to carry NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA,...

In a scenario straight out of “The Twilight Zone,” a group of NASA scientists working on an experiment in Antarctica have detected evidence of a parallel universe — where the rules of physics are the opposite of our own, according to a report. The concept of a parallel universe has been around since the early 1960s, mostly in the minds of fans of sci-fi TV shows and comics, but now a cosmic ray detection experiment has found particles that could be from a parallel realm that also was born in the Big Bang, the Daily Star reported. The experts used...

The scientists have seen unexpected things in supercurrents—electricity that moves through materials without resistance, usually at super cold temperatures—that break symmetry and are supposed to be forbidden by the conventional laws of physics, said Jigang Wang, a professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University, a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and the leader of the project. "The forbidden light gives us access to an exotic class of quantum phenomena—that's the energy and particles at the small scale of atoms—called forbidden Anderson pseudo-spin precessions," Perakis said. ... Wang's recent studies have been made possible...

It sounds like a riddle: What do you get if you take two small diamonds, put a small magnetic crystal between them and squeeze them together very slowly? The answer is a magnetic liquid, which seems counterintuitive. Liquids become solids under pressure, but not generally the other way around. But this unusual pivotal discovery, unveiled by a team of researchers working at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory, may provide scientists with new insight into high-temperature superconductivity and quantum computing. Though scientists and engineers have...

Physicists at TU Dresden have discovered spontaneous static magnetic fields with broken time-reversal symmetry in a class of iron-based superconductors. The past and the future of human life are not symmetric and therefore not reversible. In physics, this is different. The fundamental forces of nature in elementary particles, atoms and molecules are symmetric with respect to their development in time: Forwards or backwards makes no difference, scientists call this a time-reversal symmetry. However, for some years, physicists have been discovering new superconductors which brake time-reversal symmetry. To explain these observations, the basic mechanism of superconductivity, which has been known for...

Havens received a 25-year sentence in Washington in 2011 after being convicted for murder. He found his love and gift for mathematics while in solitary confinement a few months after his incarceration. His journey in mathematics and research led to him publishing a first-author paper in an academic mathematics journal in January 2020. Initially, my father, Umberto Cerruti, a number theorist who was a professor of mathematics at the University of Torino, Italy, agreed to help Havens simply because we asked him. My father thought that Havens was likely one of the many cranks that fall in love with numbers...

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) photo for today. What's happening to this spiral galaxy? Just a few hundred million years ago, NGC 2936, the upper of the two large galaxies shown, was likely a normal spiral galaxy -- spinning, creating stars -- and minding its own business. But then it got too close to the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 2937 below and took a dive. Dubbed the Porpoise Galaxy for its iconic shape, NGC 2936 is not only being deflected but also being distorted by the close gravitational interaction. A burst of young blue stars forms the nose...

A Black Hole Relic from the Big Bang –“May Exist in Our Solar System” Posted on May 4, 2020 in Science  A bowling-ball sized primordial black hole, a relic of the Big Bang, may exist in our Solar system that could be detected according to theoretical physicist Edward Witten, at the Institute for Advanced Study, who has been compared to Issac Newton and Einstein.In a paper posted September, 2019 to arXiv, physicists James Unwin, University of Illinois at Chicago and Jakub Scholtz at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, showed that the likelihood of our Sun capturing a...

In the night sky, far south of the equator, there’s a curious collection of faint constellations embedded in the tapestry of stars. They do not bear the names of myths and legends, because the ancient Greeks couldn’t see them from the Northern Hemisphere. These constellations were charted later, in the mid-18th century, by a French astronomer who sailed south ... And just like a cluttered attic, this corner of sky has been hiding something truly remarkable. Astronomers have discovered a black hole in one of the constellations, the suitably named Telescopium. At just 1,000 light-years away, the black hole is...

Experimenting with a magnetic field almost 1M times stronger than that of the Earth, researchers in the Scholes Group were able to modify the optoelectronic properties of model nonmagnetic organic chromophores. The modifications, according to the paper, arise from the induction of ring currents in the aromatic molecules. Aromatic ring currents can be understood as the proposal that electrons delocalized by aromaticity will move circularly when a magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the aromatic plane, typically nudging chemical shifts of nearby atoms in NMR spectroscopy. For the experiment, researchers chose a model aromatic chromophore called a phthalocyanine, which has...

Work on this event is very preliminary, with astronomers madly scrambling to analyse the swathes of data. But many seem in agreement that it could finally point to the source of fast radio bursts (FRBs). "This sort of, in most people's minds, settles the origin of FRBs as coming from magnetars," astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni of Caltech, and member of one of the teams, the STARE2 survey that also detected the radio signal, told ScienceAlert. Fast radio bursts are one of the most fascinating mysteries in the cosmos. They are extremely powerful radio signals from deep space, galaxies millions of light-years...

What is the fundamental nature of reality? Is space-time — the four-dimensional fabric of our universe — ultimately smooth at the tiniest of scales, or something else? It seems impossible to measure, but with the power of advanced telescopes peering through billions of light-years of distance, researchers are beginning to look down. Deep down.

New findings suggest laws of nature 'downright weird,' not as constant as previously thought by Lachlan Gilbert, University of New South Wales Scientists examining the light from one of the furthermost quasars in the universe were astonished to find fluctuations in the electromagnetic force. Credit: Shutterstock Not only does a universal constant seem annoyingly inconstant at the outer fringes of the cosmos, it occurs in only one direction, which is downright weird. Those looking forward to a day when science's Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists...

Black holes are most often discussed in terms of their mass, but how much volume do these hefty, invisible objects actually have? Lurking at the center of the Milky Way is a gargantuan black hole that tips the scales at several million times the mass of the Sun. Like all black holes, this supermassive monster — called Sagittarius A* — devours anything that falls too close, including light. However, consuming material is just one way these monsters grow to truly astronomical sizes, reaching mindboggling weights. Although astronomers often talk about black holes as being gigantic objects, it’s important to remember...

Credit: Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology The search for coveted high-temperature superconductors is going to get easier with a new 'law within a law' discovered by Skoltech and MIPT researchers and their colleagues, who figured out a link between an element's position in the Periodic Table and its potential to form a high-temperature superconducting hydride. The new paper is published in the journal Current Opinion in Solid State & Materials Science. The research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation. Superconducting materials, with zero resistance and thus no dissipation of energy to heat, would be extremely useful for...

Researchers pushing the limits of magnets as a means to create faster electronics published their proof of concept findings today, April 10, in the journal Science. . . . The team exploring methods for creating machines that operate at trillions of cycles per second includes the University of California, Santa Cruz and Riverside, Ohio State University, Oakland University (Michigan) and New York University, among others. Today's computers rely on ferromagnets (the same kind that stick to your refrigerator) to align the binary 1s and 0s that process and store information. Anti-ferromagnets are much more powerful, but their natural state, displaying...

The image of a black hole has a bright ring of emission surrounding a "shadow" cast by the black hole. This ring is composed of a stack of increasingly sharp subrings that correspond to the number of orbits that photons took around the black hole before reaching the observer. Credit: George Wong (UIUC) and Michael Johnson (CfA) _________________________________________________________________________________ Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) sparked international excitement when it unveiled the first image of a black hole. Today, a team of researchers have published new calculations that predict a striking and intricate substructure within black hole images from extreme...

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...