It’s the perfect science-fiction device: a hurricane of dark matter. Recent, real-life research has demonstrated that our Sun is currently engulfed in a so-called a stellar stream. Some publications have seized on this ominous-sounding idea, reporting that Earth is about to be walloped by a dark matter storm—but in…
A selection of work and belongings of the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking snatched hundreds of thousands of dollars per item at a recent Christie’s auction. Among the items sold were his motorized red leather wheelchair and a copy of his doctoral thesis Properties of Expanding Universes—one of five known…
An experiment using intense laser pulses has allowed scientists to watch plants produce oxygen from water part of photosynthesis in real time, according to a groundbreaking new paper.
It’s been a big week for the service journalism here at Gizmodo dot com. We published an exhaustive guide to the 100 websites that shaped the internet as we know it, for better or worse (not you, NASA), regardless of whether this internet thing was all a terrible mistake. We explored how archivists could save history…
In what would be somewhat of a revelation had the late theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking not been one of the world’s most famous atheists—and spoken or written on the topic on numerous occasions—media outlets are playing up that Hawking’s final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions contains the…
One of NASA’s flagship telescopes, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, went into safe mode last week following gyroscope problems. That telescope is now back up and running.
Harvard physicist Cumrun Vafa is one of string theory’s strongest proponents. But this summer, other string theorists have been reeling from his latest conjecture, which might invalidate their ideas built on a decade-long assumption that dark energy is constant. Vafa’s work implies that dark energy’s value changes.
You might wonder why, given all the hype, there isn’t graphene in every product you own yet. Well, a new study has found that 60 companies that sell the Nobel prize-winning ultra-thin carbon sheets produce utter trash.
Leon Lederman, the former head of the Fermi National Accelerator Lab and winner of the the Nobel Prize in physics in 1988, died at a nursing home in Idaho on October 3rd. He was 96.
This weekend, a prominent Italian physicist, Alessandro Strumia, lectured fledging women scientists at CERN about the dangers of gender equality and “cultural Marxism” within science, argued that women can’t be as good at physics as men, and complained that the actual victims of gender discrimination are male…
As if the devastating effects of bombs dropped on European cities during the Second World War weren’t terrible enough, a surprising new study shows that the shockwaves produced by these bombing raids reached the edge of space, temporarily weakening the Earth’s ionosphere.
The tech and science world has had a very interesting week: Researchers have discovered what happens when you give our favorite tentacled, ocean-dwelling friends MDMA, landed rovers on asteroids, confirmed the oldest known animal fossil on the planet, and found something very weird going on with a distant neutron star…
Sitting atop Saturn’s north pole is one of the Solar System’s most striking weather patterns: a rotating, color-changing hexagon slightly wider than Earth. A new study shows there’s another hexagon directly on top of the first one—and that’s weird.
Here at Gizmodo, we’ve just wrapped up Feud Week: A series on personality and business clashes in the tech world, scientific disputes, and whether or not to shoot Bigfoot. (I say let the big guy do his thing, unless it turns out it’s kidnapping people with mind-waves to make more Bigfoots.) Some have said that a Nice…
Gravity might feel strong if you drop a bowling ball on your feet, but is in fact the weakest force. Compare it to electromagnetism: the pull of all the Earth’s gravity can’t stop you from picking up a paperclip with a refrigerator magnet. That weakness makes gravity incredibly difficult to measure.
A fight over the very nature of the universe has turned ugly on social media and in the popular science press, complete with accusations of “cheating” and ad hominem attacks on Twitter. Most of the universe is hiding, and some scientists disagree over where it has gone.
The end of summer is fast approaching, though the fun in the sun is coming to an even swifter conclusion for some of us: Take the tale of Paul Ceglia, the man who allegedly used forged documents naming him as a Facebook co-owner to try and rip off CEO Mark Zuckerberg in court. This week, police reportedly arrested…
If you read enough science news, you’ll know that there’s a long list of experiments attempting to “prove Einstein wrong.” None have yet contradicted his hallmark theory of relativity. But the latest effort to falsify his statements surrounding “spooky action at a distance” has gone truly cosmic.
