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Scientists have peered further back in time than ever before using instruments designed to search for a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago but not yet proven to exist. An American observatory hunting for ripples in space and time called gravitational waves has produced its most significant results yet, despite not having directly detected any. Tycho's Supernova The “non-discovery” offers insights into the state of the Universe just 60 seconds into its existence. Previous research has been unable to look back in time further than about 380,000 years after the big bang. The new window on the...

The Invariant Set Postulate differentiates between reality and unreality, suggesting the existence of a state space, within which a smaller subset of state space (reality) is embedded. (PhysOrg.com) -- Since the early days of quantum mechanics, scientists have been trying to understand the many strange implications of the theory: superpositions, wave-particle duality, and the observer’s role in measurements, to name a few. Now, a new proposed law of physics that describes the geometry of physical reality on the cosmological scale might help answer some of these questions. Plus, the new law could give some clues about the role of...

Mathematicians have proposed an alternative explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe that does not rely on the mystifying idea of dark energy. According to the new proposition, the universe is not accelerating, as observations suggest. Instead, an expanding wave flowing through space-time has caused distant galaxies to appear to be accelerating away from us. This big wave, initiated after the Big Bang that is thought to have sparked the universe, could explain why objects today appear to be farther away from us than they should be according to the Standard Model of cosmology. "We're saying that maybe the...

The world's smallest laser, contained in a silica sphere just 44 nanometres across, has been unveiled. At about 10 times smaller than the wavelength of light, however, this is no ordinary laser, it is the first ever 'spaser'. Whereas a laser amplifies light, using a mirrored cavity to intensify it, a spaser amplifies surface plasmons — tiny oscillations in the density of free electrons on the surface of metals, which, in turn, produce light waves. The spaser could be used as a light source for scanning near-field optical microscopes, which can resolve details beyond the reach of standard light microscopy,...

Well, this is NOT a perpetual motion machine, but something interesting.. from the article: ... A Zero point magnetic power generator is basically a Free Energy Generator. It uses magnets, and magnetic force to induce perpetual motion. It runs by itself, indefinitely without stopping, thus creating completely free electrical energy... A Perpetual motion device refers to a machine that runs perpetually i.e. indefinitely, and produces a larger amount of energy than it consumes. Thus, it produces free energy indefinitely, runs by itself, without having to need a third-party device or resource to power it... SkyNews vid: http://www.youtube.com/v/w8TJlQlPi4s

Google “E=mc2 is wrong” and you get 1,060 hits. Google “E=mc2 is correct” and you get a mere 138 hits. There you have it. It took us a more than a century, but finally this crazy inconsistent theory of relativity got outvoted. Common sense cries victory! Fortunately, science does not work that way. Science is no democracy, and we do not render a theory invalid by popular vote. Einstein's theory of relativity has stood the test of time and its correctness is beyond any doubt. But... there is an issue with what is arguably the most famous equation in the...

BlackLight Power, Inc. Announces Independent Validation of Breakthrough New Energy Source Based on a New Form of Hydrogen and Chemistry Capable of Continuous Regeneration Cranbury, NJ (August 12, 2009)—BlackLight Power, Inc. (BLP) today announces that scientists at Rowan University have for the first time independently formulated and tested fuels that on demand generated energy greater than that of combustion at power levels of kilowatts using BLP’s proprietary solid-fuel chemistry capable of continuous regeneration. Operating power systems using BLP’s chemistry, Rowan University professors have reported a net energy gain of up to 6.5 times the maximum energy potential of the materials...

IT IS the ultimate cosmic villain: space and time come to an abrupt end in its presence and the laws of physics break down. Now it seems a "naked" black hole may yet emerge in our universe, after spinning away its event horizon.

Are cosmic rays revealing the quantum nature of spacetime? Could theories of (not) everything help solve the puzzle of quantum gravity? The architect of doubly special relativity thinks so.In his youth, there were two things that regularly competed for Giovanni Amelino-Camelia’s attention: his favorite soccer team, Napoli, and "anything that came close to being scientific." And since Napoli was struggling in the Italian soccer league in the summer of 1978, Amelino-Camelia found himself watching a series of programs on special relativity instead of soccer. "That was really the point of no return for me," he remembers. "Although I was 13-years...

WASHINGTON -- Imagine a carbon sheet that's only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips. That's graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It is creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers. "It is the thinnest known material in the universe and the strongest ever measured," Andre Geim, a physicist at the University of Manchester, England, wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science. "A few grams could cover a football field," Rod Ruoff, a graphene researcher...

This message, made up of tiny crystals suspended in a gel, was created using a series of laser pulses scanned through a template.A. Alexander / U. Edinburgh A technique that creates crystals on demand using laser pulses could make it easier to prepare the high-quality crystals needed to study protein structure.Chemists and biologists need crystals of proteins and other chemicals to analyse their atomic structure using X-rays, while many industrial processes rely on triggering crystal formation at precisely the right time and place during the production of drugs and other useful compounds.Yet "crystallization still remains largely a black art," says...

The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections. Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies. Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean. After 15 years and $9 billion, and a showy “switch-on” ceremony last September, the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, has to yet collide any particles at all. But soon? This week, scientists and engineers...

Scientists claim to have created a form of aluminum that's nearly transparent to extreme ultraviolet radiation and which is a new state of matter. It's an idea straight out of science fiction, featured in the movie "Star Trek IV." Fusion is a dream of scientists who would create cheap and plentiful power by fusing atoms together, as opposed to nuclear fission that generates electricity today.

Armchair astronomers have helped discover a batch of tiny galaxies that may help professional astronomers understand how galaxies formed stars in the early universe. Dubbed the "Green Peas," the galaxies are forming stars 10 times faster then the Milky Way despite being 10 times smaller and 100 times less massive. They are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away "These are among the most extremely active star-forming galaxies we've ever found," said Carolin Cardamone, lead author of a paper on the discoveries to be published in an upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion. In the journal Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly...

Gamma-ray spike in Fermi telescope data hikes anticipation.The jury is still out on whether Fermi has spied dark matter.NASA/DOE/International LAT Team The murky hunt for dark matter has just got a little bit brighter. New gamma-ray results from the FERMI telescope fit with previous tantalizing hints of a detection of the mysterious stuff.Last year, a series of independent experiments caused a stir because they seemed to have detected signals of dark matter, which is believed to make up 85% of the universe's matter."There's been tremendous excitement about cosmic ray signals that have dark matter as one possible explanation," says Neal...

Hideo Hosono's research group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology was not looking for a superconductor in 2006. Rather the team was trying to create new kinds of transparent semiconductors for flat-panel displays. But when the researchers characterized the electronic properties of their new substance -- a combination of lanthanum, oxygen, iron and phosphorus -- they found that below four kelvins, or -269 degrees Celsius, it lost all resistance to carrying an electric current; that is, it superconducted. Although 4 K is far below the current laboratory record of 138 K (let alone the holy grail of "room temperature," or...

Baroque field gets fresh lease of life in condensed-matter physics. String theory - more than just a 'theory of everything'?Alamy Until recently, string theory — long heralded as a 'theory of everything' — hadn't been particularly good at explaining anything.But at a workshop this month at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, scientists have been using the theory to make progress in tackling one of the biggest puzzles in condensed-matter physics: the origin of high-temperature superconductivity. String theory suggests that vibrating strings that exist in 10 dimensions underpin the observable Universe. Although that basic premise is still...

To a physicist, life seems little short of miraculous — all those stupid atoms getting together to perform such clever tricks! For centuries, living organisms were regarded as some sort of magic matter. Today, we know that no special “life force” is at work in biology; there is just ordinary matter doing extraordinary things, all the while obeying the familiar laws of physics. What, then, is the secret of life’s remarkable properties? In the late 1940s and 1950s it was fashionable to suppose that quantum mechanics — or perhaps some soon-to-be-formulated “post-quantum mechanics” — held the key to the mystery...

Today we present a very special installment of the Codex Futurius, Science Not Fiction’s look at the big scientific ideas in sci-fi: Kevin Grazier—JPL physicist and friend of SNF—gives an insider’s peek at the workings of and discussion around the Orion antimatter drive used to propel the Phaeton starship in Ron D. Moore’s recent TV movie, Virtuality. Grazier was a science adviser for the movie (which was intended to be the pilot for an ongoing show), so he was right in the middle of these discussions. The screenshot further down in this post shows the actual spreadsheet used in the...