String theory has been famously untestable for decades. This week the Economist reported that has changed, and the reason involves an extra dimension of space that might be just big enough to notice in a tabletop experiment. There is a rather different way to read the situation. Let's take a look.
There is money in telling you AI will destroy humanity, and there is money in telling you it will improve your life. Both sides are quietly paying creators to make the case. Some of it is disclosed properly and some of it very much is not. Let's take a look.
The butterfly effect is much stranger than most people think, and the famous line about a butterfly in Brazil isn't what Lorenz actually meant. A group of researchers has now worked out that quantum physics puts a hard wall on weather prediction, at 129 days. Not difficult after that. Impossible. And this has implications far beyond the weather forecast because chaos enters in everything from
The dark matter search LUX-ZEPLIN has announced that they have made a detection that could be the first ever evidence for a dark matter particle. Just what have they measured, what could it be, and what does it mean? I have a brief summary.
Artificial intelligence has eaten mathematics. In the past few months alone it turned up a counterexample to a conjecture open since 1939, disproved a thirty-year-old result, and made real progress on the Riemann hypothesis. Young mathematicians are somewhere between depression and anger about it. Physics is next, and almost nobody is talking about it. Let's take a look.
An astrophysicist has claimed that some unidentified anomalous phenomena that were observed in recent years in the United States might be warp drives. He has written a paper about it in which he calculates how such a warp drive would look. I have a brief summary.
Quantum computing was supposed to be the next big thing, and for years the companies building it kept promising commercial payoffs were just around the corner and possible already with small, noisy devices (NISQs). Google, IBM, IonQ, they all gave dates. None of them delivered. So why is the industry more optimistic today than ever? Let's take a look.
A nuclear fusion startup in New Zealand just published a design for a "levitating dipole" reactor, an approach almost everyone had written off as fundamentally flawed. It’s the first new idea in nuclear fusion design for decades. Let's take a look.
Scientists have discovered a new type of matter. Inside a cooled crystal, structures spontaneously arranged themselves into a three dimensional weave, and they did it at around room temperature. The researchers can even rewrite parts of the pattern with a laser. News like this doesn't come every day. Let's take a look.
Could our universe have been born inside a collapsing star? That idea recently made headlines, and I got a lot of questions about it. The paper behind them describes a new solution to Einstein's equations in which a collapsing star expands on the inside and never forms a black hole. Let's take a look.
A group of astronomers say they've spotted more than twenty giant unidentified objects racing around the Moon, some of them forty kilometres across, and that the Moon serves as a base for them. The daily mail loved it. My bullshit meter did not survive it. But underneath all this nonsense there's a serious question that almost nobody is looking into. Let's take a look.
You've probably heard that quantum mechanics is spooky, that measuring one particle instantly affects another across any distance. A physicist now says there's a reason: the universe doesn't have one dimension of time, but two. It sounds absurd, but he's got the maths and even a way to test it. Genius or nonsense? Let's take a look.
The origin of life is one of the biggest mysteries left in science. Now a group of researchers says there wasn't just one originsttr, there were two. And I want to explain why, despite how impossibly long ago it all happened, I'm actually optimistic that we'll one day work out how life began. Let's take a look.
How special is Earth? It's one of those questions that runs through all of science, and here's a version of it most people have never thought about: why does our planet even have continents? A group of geologists now says the answer lies somewhere unexpected, in the shape of the Milky Way itself. Let's take a look.
The war on artificial intelligence is no longer just online arguments and complaints about data centers. Something has shifted, and law enforcement has noticed. Where did this new anti-technology movement come from, who's behind it, and where is it heading next? Let's take a look.
Neuroscientists have long assumed that when a brain region becomes more active, more blood flows to it. That assumption is the entire basis of functional magnetic resonance imaging. A new paper now says it's wrong for about 40% of the signals, and it isn't the only recent study to find that a lot of what we thought we knew about the brain rests on bad measurements. Let's take a look.
The dumber you are, the more certain you are that you aren't. That's the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it's been used to explain everything from bad politicians to the state of social media. Now psychologists have gone back to the biggest dataset we have and come out with the opposite conclusion. But there's a reason both sides can look at the same dots and see the opposite thing. Let's take a look.
Login
