Physics

Why Did Scientists Cool LEGOs to Nearly Absolute Zero?

Scientists cooled LEGOs to nearly absolute zero—and hope to one day incorporate a LEGO-style material into a quantum computer. Objects that transfer heat slowly form useful components in technologies that operate at very cold temperatures—technologies like quantum computers. Other industrial plastics also transfer heat slowly, but can be expensive at large quantities. The researchers from…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Amazon Officially Enters the Quantum Computing Race

At its AWS re:Invent 2019 conference on Monday, Amazon announced the launch of a quantum cloud computing platform. Now that quantum computers are real and can perform computations (albeit not well), companies are introducing platforms upon which scientists and others interested in the technology can experiment. Amazon’s system, named Braket, will provide access to three…

Commerce Ryan F. Mandelbaum

CERN’s Oldest Particle Accelerator Is Still Running 60 Years Later

The oldest particle accelerator at CERN, home to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, is celebrating its 60th birthday. It’s still running. The Proton Synchrotron (PS) accelerated its first protons on November 24, 1959. It was the world’s highest-energy accelerator when it first began running. Though it’s since lost the title, today it supplies protons…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Image: Zarija Lukic/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Let’s Pump the Brakes on the So-Called ‘No-Brainer Nobel Prize’

Researchers in Hungary have published the exciting new claim that they’ve discovered a new subatomic particle, but it’s nowhere near time to start talking about Nobel Prizes, as CNN (and now everyone who syndicates them) has done. Since 2015, the team at the Institute of Nuclear Research (Atomki) and the University of Debrecen claims to…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Google Scientists Are Using Quantum Computers to Study Wormholes

Google researchers are figuring out how to study some of the weirdest theorized physics phenomena, like wormholes that link pairs of black holes, using experiments in a lab. One central question driving theoretical physics today is how to use the same theory to explain both gravity and the rules that atoms follow, called quantum mechanics.…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Astronauts Are On a Spacewalk Right Now to Repair a Crucial Dark Matter Experiment

Astronauts Andrew Morgan of NASA and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency are outside of the International Space Station (ISS) as we speak. The duo are taking a space walk to fix a key dark matter experiment. You can watch (and rewatch) the progress here. Spacewalks happen regularly (there was a historic one just…

Space & Spaceflight Ryan F. Mandelbaum

How the 2010s Changed Physics Forever

This decade marked not just one but a series of turning points in the history of physics. The 2010s were an incredible decade for new knowledge, but more importantly, this decade’s discoveries—and the resounding lack thereof—have changed the way physicists think about their respective fields. Particle physics and astrophysics have entered new eras that will…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum

How to Make a Black Hole in a Science Lab

Nearly 50 years ago—before Interstellar, A Brief History of Time, and certainly the Event Horizon Telescope—postdoctoral researcher William Unruh was attempting to explain black holes to a crowd at an Oxford University colloquium. There were no reference points with which to compare an object so dense that light cannot escape its warped gravity. So he…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum

First Look at ‘Sycamore,’ Google’s Quantum Computer

Between the mountainous and coastal vistas of Goleta, California, sits an unassuming office on the side of a building next to the freeway. It could belong to any Southern California company; workers sit in gray cubicles beneath fluorescent lights, and there’s a rack to hold employees’ bikes and surfboards. But at those desks are physicists…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum

The Future of Particle Physics Is Bright, Bleak, and Magical

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson back in the summer of 2012. Nicknamed “the God particle,” it was the last new undiscovered particle predicted by the backbone theory of particle physics. Since then, physicists have found a whole lot of, well, nothing. The Higgs high hasn’t carried…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Google Confirms Achieving Quantum Supremacy

This morning, Google scientists confirmed in a blog post that their quantum computer had needed just 200 seconds to solve a problem that they claim would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to complete. The team first ran the algorithm last spring using a 54-qubit processor called “Sycamore.” While the achievement is called quantum…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum

NASA Space Weather Satellite Set to Launch Tonight, Finally

NASA is ready to launch its space weather-measuring satellite tonight, following two years of delays. The Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, will measure the highest region of the atmosphere where Earth weather interacts with space weather. Initially scheduled to go up Wednesday, it’s now set to launch Thursday from a Pegasus XL rocket dropped from…

Space & Spaceflight Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Physicists Create Lab System That Looks Like Theorized Dark Matter Particle

Scientists have discovered a phenomenon that looks a whole lot like a dark matter particle in a laboratory system, according to new research. Axions are a yet-to-be-observed fundamental particle that are predicted to exist by physics theory. They’re a potential explanation as to what’s causing the mysterious cosmic anomalies attributed to dark matter. But physicists…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Photo: Flickr User pollosaurio, M. McCaughrean, Franck Schneider

Physicists Win Nobel Prize for Finding Exoplanet Around a Sun-Like Star and for Helping Develop Theory of the Universe

The 2019 Physics Nobel Prize will be awarded half to James Peebles of Princeton University, and half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, for theoretical work improving our understanding of the universe and for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star, respectively. The annual award…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

What Ad Astra Gets Wrong About Space Travel, Astronomy, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

As an astrophysicist and a film critic, I’ve been waiting my whole life for a big-budget adventure film that spans the whole solar system. There are some stunning sequences in Ad Astra, and many of the details about astronaut life and space travel are spot-on. But some of the themes and ideas that drive the…

Tech News Andy Howell

A Huge Experiment Has ‘Weighed’ the Tiny Neutrino, a Particle That Passes Right Through Matter

An experiment nearly two decades in the making has finally unveiled its measurements of the mass of the universe’s most abundant matter particle: the neutrino. The neutrino could be the weirdest subatomic particle; though abundant, it requires some of the most sensitive detectors to observe. Scientists have been working for decades to figure out whether…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Why xkcd Creator Randall Munroe Wrote the World’s Most Extreme ‘How To’ Book

While waiting for your flight to board, you look at your phone and realize its battery is at 1 percent. You look around but can’t find a power outlet. There might be practical solutions to this problem. Or, you could follow Randall Munroe’s instructions and attach a paddle wheel to an escalator in order to…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

MIT Researchers Build Functional Carbon Nanotube Microprocessor

Scientists at MIT built a 16-bit microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes and even ran a program on it, a new paper reports. Silicon-based computer processors seem to be approaching a limit to how small they can be scaled, so researchers are looking for other materials that might make for useful processors. It appears that transistors…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Illustration: Carl Knox, OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence/Gizmodo

Mystery Deepens Around Newly Detected Ripples in Space-Time

The true identity of last week’s purported neutron star-black hole merger may never be known, as follow-up searches for a source of the signal have turned up nothing. Scientists affiliated with the LIGO detector announced last week that they’d spotted, in the form of gravitational waves, what appeared to be a black hole gobbling up…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Graphic: Christian Arnold/Baojiu Li/Durham University

A New Experiment Narrows Potential Properties of Dark Energy Particle

An experiment in the United Kingdom has failed to find evidence of a particle meant to explain most of the universe’s mass. But the search isn’t over. When cosmologists observe the way the universe expands, they find that present-day theories of matter can’t explain most of the universe’s energy. They call the unknown energy “dark…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Why Did Scientists Cool LEGOs to Nearly Absolute Zero?

Amazon Officially Enters the Quantum Computing Race

CERN’s Oldest Particle Accelerator Is Still Running 60 Years Later

Let’s Pump the Brakes on the So-Called ‘No-Brainer Nobel Prize’

Google Scientists Are Using Quantum Computers to Study Wormholes

Astronauts Are On a Spacewalk Right Now to Repair a Crucial Dark Matter Experiment

How the 2010s Changed Physics Forever

How to Make a Black Hole in a Science Lab

First Look at ‘Sycamore,’ Google’s Quantum Computer

The Future of Particle Physics Is Bright, Bleak, and Magical

Google Confirms Achieving Quantum Supremacy

NASA Space Weather Satellite Set to Launch Tonight, Finally

Physicists Create Lab System That Looks Like Theorized Dark Matter Particle

Physicists Win Nobel Prize for Finding Exoplanet Around a Sun-Like Star and for Helping Develop Theory of the Universe

What Ad Astra Gets Wrong About Space Travel, Astronomy, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

A Huge Experiment Has ‘Weighed’ the Tiny Neutrino, a Particle That Passes Right Through Matter

Why xkcd Creator Randall Munroe Wrote the World’s Most Extreme ‘How To’ Book

MIT Researchers Build Functional Carbon Nanotube Microprocessor

Mystery Deepens Around Newly Detected Ripples in Space-Time

A New Experiment Narrows Potential Properties of Dark Energy Particle

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