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In two weeks' time, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is going to present the world with new information about our Milky Way. It's anyone's guess what the announcement will be, but based on what we know of their recent efforts, there's reason to get excited – the results being presented are from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, which was responsible for producing the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019. For years now the EHT project has been studying the heart of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, which is most likely home to a supermassive black hole...

Associate professor Mazhar Ali and his research group at TU Delft have discovered one-way superconductivity without magnetic fields, something that was thought to be impossible ever since its discovery in 1911 – up till now. The discovery, published in Nature, makes use of 2D quantum materials and paves the way towards superconducting computing. Superconductors can make electronics hundreds of times faster, all with zero energy loss. Ali: “If the 20th century was the century of semi-conductors, the 21st can become the century of the superconductor.” During the 20th century many scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, have puzzled over the nature...

Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: Of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock. But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously. How can that be, and what would it mean? It'll take a little while to explain, but don't worry: Even if time doesn't exist, our lives will go on as usual. A crisis in physics Physics is in crisis. For the past century or so, we have explained the Universe with two wildly successful physical theories: general...

Subatomic particles paint pictures of inner worlds of pyramids, volcanoes and more illustration of muon particles raining down on the Great Pyramid of Giza - An invisible rain of the subatomic particles called muons pierces structures on Earth’s surface, including the Great Pyramid of Giza. Those muons can help map out the chambers within the pyramid and have even revealed an unexplained hidden void. Inside Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza lies a mysterious cavity, its void unseen by any living human, its surface untouched by modern hands. But luckily, scientists are no longer limited by human senses. To feel out...

Two teams of researchers working independently have shown the viability of using neutral atoms to create quantum circuits—both have published outlines of their work in the journal Nature. One of the groups, with members from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, ColdQuanta and Riverlane, successfully ran an algorithm on a cold atom quantum computer for the first time. The second group, with members from Harvard, MIT, QuEra Computing Inc., the University of Innsbruck and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, showed that it was possible to build a quantum processor based on coherent transport of entangled atom arrays. Hannah Williams, with Durham...

[T]he teams at CERN were able to make a number of updates and improvements to the particle accelerator to support new, next-generation science during the scheduled shutdown. As the most powerful accelerator in the world, the LHC can generate hundreds of millions of particle collisions every second. Although the LHC has led to new physics research throughout both of its previous, successful runs, teams at CERN hope to push their explorations with the new upgrades implemented during the shutdown. Included in these improvements, CERN has increased the power of the LHC's injectors, which feed the beams of accelerated particles into...

Cuprous oxide crystal. (University of St Andrews) One of the ways we can fully realize the potential of quantum computers is by basing them on both light and matter – this way, information can be stored and processed, but also travel at the speed of light. Scientists have just taken a step closer to this goal, by successfully producing the largest hybrid particles of light and matter ever created. These quasiparticles, known as Rydberg polaritons, were made with the help of a piece of stone containing cuprous oxide (Cu2O) crystals from an ancient deposit in Namibia, one of the few...

Artist’s impression of GNz7q (ESA/Hubble, N. Bartmann) A first-of-its-kind 'missing link' object detected in the early Universe may solve the mystery of the oldest supermassive black holes in existence, scientists say. The discovery of GNz7q, a black hole dating back to just 750 million years after the Big Bang, aligns with theoretical predictions of what an 'ancestor' to supermassive black holes might look like – and while it's something we've never seen before, there could be many more like it. "It's unlikely that discovering GNz7q … was just 'dumb luck'," says astronomer Gabriel Brammer from the University of Copenhagen in...

Scientists just outside Chicago have found that the mass of a sub-atomic particle is not what it should be. The measurement is the first conclusive experimental result that is at odds with one of the most important and successful theories of modern physics. The team has found that the particle, known as a W boson, is more massive than the theories predicted. The scientists at the Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) in Illinois have found only a tiny difference in the mass of the W Boson compared with what the theory says it should be - just 0.1%. But if confirmed...

The Fermilab Collider Detector obtained a result that could transform the current theory of physics Scientists just outside Chicago have found that the mass of a sub-atomic particle is not what it should be. The measurement is the first conclusive experimental result that is at odds with one of the most important and successful theories of modern physics. The team has found that the particle, known as a W boson, is more massive than the theories predicted. The result has been described as "shocking" by Prof David Toback, who is the project co-spokesperson. The discovery could lead to the development...

Scientists have detected a strange new type of high-frequency wave on the sun's surface, and the waves are moving three times faster than scientists thought was possible. The acoustic waves, called high-frequency retrograde (HFR) vorticity waves, were spotted rippling backward through the sun's plasma in the opposite direction of its rotation. The previously unknown type of wave was described in a study published March 24 in the journal Nature Astronomy. Scientists can't see into the sun's fiery depths, so they often measure the acoustic waves that move across its surface and bounce back toward its core to infer what's going...

The further we move away from a heat source, the cooler the air gets... the surface of the Sun starts at 6000 degC, but over a short distance of only a few hundred kilometers, it suddenly heats up to more than a million degrees, becoming its atmosphere, or corona...The popular theories are based on heating caused by turbulence, and heating caused by a type of magnetic wave called ion cyclotron waves.“Both, however, have some problem – turbulence struggles to explain why Hydrogen, Helium and Oxygen in the gas become as hot as they do, while electrons remain surprisingly cold; while...

<p>At the heart of every black hole sits a problem. As they sizzle away into nothingness over the eons, they take with them a small piece of the Universe. Which, quite frankly, just isn't in the rule book.</p><p>It's a paradox the late Stephen Hawking left us with as a part of his revolutionary work on these monstrous objects, inspiring researchers to tinker with potential solutions for the better part of half a century.</p>

The 0.34 nm gate-length side-wall monolayer MoS2 transistor device structure and characterization. Credit: Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04323-3A team of researchers working at Tsinghua University in China has created a sub-1-nm gate in a MoS2 transistor. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group outlines how they created the super tiny gate and explains why they believe it will be difficult for anyone to beat their record. For most of the history of microcomputing, Moore's Law has held up—researchers and engineers have managed to double the speed and capability of computers regularly by reducing the size of their components....

The Latin School of Chicago appears to have been a breeding ground for critical race curricula that later gave excuses for political violence. lthough critical race theory has only come to the forefront of American politics in the last year, an email obtained by The Federalist dating back to 2016 proves the divisive ideology has been entrenched in American K-12 schools for much longer, sometimes where some least expect it. An email from Elizabeth Denevi, who at the time was the director of studies and professional development at the Latin School of Chicago, shows the private school injected CRT into...

I refute some very optimistic claims about fusion power and discuss some of the challenges in making this long-sought after technology a reality.Former fusion scientist on why we won't have fusion power by 2040September 10, 2021 | Improbable Matter

Louisiana State University physicists have leveraged quantum information theory techniques to reveal a mechanism for amplifying, or "stimulating," the production of entanglement in the Hawking effect in a controlled manner. Furthermore, these scientists propose a protocol for testing this idea in the laboratory using artificially produced event horizons. These results have been recently published in Physical Review Letters, "Quantum aspects of stimulated Hawking radiation in an analog white-black hole pair," where Ivan Agullo, Anthony J. Brady and Dimitrios Kranas present these ideas and apply them to optical systems containing the analog of a pair white-black hole. Stephen Hawking added more...

In 2020 a team led by European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers reported the closest black hole to Earth, located just 1000 light-years away in the HR 6819 system. But the results of their study were contested by other researchers, including by an international team based at KU Leuven, Belgium. In a paper published today, these two teams have united to report that there is in fact no black hole in HR 6819, which is instead a “vampire” two-star system in a rare and short-lived stage of its evolution. The original study on HR 6819 received significant attention from both the...

NASA’S NEW SHORTCUT TO FUSION POWER Lattice confinement fusion eliminates massive magnets and powerful lasers PHYSICISTS FIRST SUSPECTED more than a century ago that the fusing of hydrogen into helium powers the sun. It took researchers many years to unravel the secrets by which lighter elements are smashed together into heavier ones inside stars, releasing energy in the process. And scientists and engineers have continued to study the sun’s fusion process in hopes of one day using nuclear fusion to generate heat or electricity. But the prospect of meeting our energy needs this way remains elusive. The extraction of energy...

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A team of University of Arkansas physicists has successfully developed a circuit capable of capturing graphene's thermal motion and converting it into an electrical current. “An energy-harvesting circuit based on graphene could be incorporated into a chip to provide clean, limitless, low-voltage power for small devices or sensors,” said Paul Thibado, professor of physics and lead researcher in the discovery.The findings, titled "Fluctuation-induced current from freestanding graphene," and published in the journal Physical Review E, are proof of a theory the physicists developed at the U of A three years ago that freestanding graphene — a single...