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science

SCIENCE: How Will the Universe End?

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How will the universe end? “Not with a bang but with a whimper,” wrote the American poet T.S. Eliot regarding the end of the world. But if you want a more definite response, you’ll find that physicists have spent countless hours turning this question over in their minds, and have neatly fit the most plausible hypotheses into a few categories. “In textbooks and cosmology class, we learn there are three basic futures for the universe,” said Robert Caldwell, a cosmologist at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire. In one scenario, the cosmos could continue to expand forever, with all matter … Read more

Quantum Computer Can See Sixteen Possible Futures

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When Mile Gu boots up his new computer, he can see the future. At least, 16 possible versions of it — all at the same time. Gu, an assistant professor of physics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, works in quantum computing. This branch of science uses the weird laws that govern the universe’s smallest particles to help computers calculate more efficiently. Unlike classical computers, which store information as bits (binary digits of either 0 or 1), quantum computers code information into quantum bits, or qubits. These subatomic particles, thanks to the weird laws of quantum mechanics, can exist in … Read more

SCIENCE: What Happened Before the Big Bang?

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The Big Bang is commonly thought of as the start of it all: About 13.8 billion years ago, the observable universe went boom and expanded into being. But what were things like before the Big Bang?Short answer: We don’t know. Long answer: It could have been a lot of things, each mind-bending in its own way. The first thing to understand is what the Big Bang actually was. “The Big Bang is a moment in time, not a point in space,” said Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and author of “The Big Picture: On … Read more

SCIENCE: AI Is Creepy-Good at predicting Early Death

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Medical researchers have unlocked an unsettling ability in artificial intelligence (AI): predicting a person’s early death. Scientists recently trained an AI system to evaluate a decade of general health data submitted by more than half a million people in the United Kingdom. Then, they tasked the AI with predicting if individuals were at risk of dying prematurely — in other words, sooner than the average life expectancy — from chronic disease, they reported in a new study. The predictions of early death that were made by AI algorithms were “significantly more accurate” than predictions delivered by a model that did … Read more

SPACE: Could Carbon Monoxide Be a Sign Of Life?

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Scientists hunting for signs of alien life shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss carbon monoxide (CO), a new study suggests. The substance is highly poisonous to people and most other animal life here on Earth because it latches firmly onto hemoglobin, preventing this blood protein from carrying vital oxygen in the required quantities. And the gas hasn’t typically rated as a promising “biosignature” that astrobiologists should target in the search for ET. Indeed, many researchers regard CO as an anti-biosignature, because it’s a readily available source of carbon and energy that life-forms should theoretically gobble up. So, finding lots of … Read more

Scientists Reverse Time (In a Really Small Way)

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Time goes in one direction: forward. Little boys become old men but not vice versa; teacups shatter but never spontaneously reassemble. This cruel and immutable property of the universe, called the “arrow of time,” is fundamentally a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that systems will always tend to become more disordered over time. But recently, researchers from the U.S. and Russia have bent that arrow just a bit — at least for subatomic particles. In the new study, published Tuesday (Mar. 12) in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers manipulated the arrow of time using a very … Read more

SCIENCE: Twelve Year Old Builds a Fusion reactor

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A 12-year-old kid from Tennessee created a nuclear reaction in his family’s playroom in January 2018, according The Guardian. That makes him the youngest known person to have done so. The Open Source Fusor Research Consortium (a group of nuclear hobbyists) recognized Jackson Oswalt’s achievement on Feb. 2, according to a report by commercial appeal, a USA Today affiliate. Oswalt, now 14, built a machine that generates a plasma in which nuclear fusion occurs — not splitting an atom, but rather crushing atoms together to form heavier atoms. So to answer the obvious question: Yes, nuclear reactions are things you … Read more

SCIENCE: Climate Change Could Destroy Stratocumulus Clouds, Which Would Scorch the Planet

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If humanity pumps enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, one of Earth’s most important types of cloud could go extinct. And if the stratocumulus clouds — those puffy, low rolls of vapor that blanket much of the planet at any given moment — disappear, Earth’s temperature could climb sharply and radically, to heights not predicted in current climate models. That’s the conclusion of a paper published today (Feb. 25) in the journal Nature Geoscience and described in detail by Natalie Wolchover for Quanta Magazine. As Wolchover explained, clouds have long been one of the great uncertainties of climate models. Clouds … Read more

SCIENCE: Does the Earth Eat Its Oceans Every Billion years?

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The ancient supercontinent of Rodinia turned inside out as the Earth swallowed its own ocean some 700 million years ago, new research suggests. Rodinia was a supercontinent that preceded the more famous Pangea, which existed between 320 million and 170 million years ago. In a new study, scientists led by Zheng-Xiang Li of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, argue that supercontinents and their superoceans form and break up in alternating cycles that sometimes preserve the ocean crust and sometimes recycle it back into Earth’s interior. “We suggest that the Earth’s mantle structure only gets completely reorganised every second supercontinent [or … Read more