It would be silly to think that scientists and astronomers have spotted all of the different kinds of weird things that exist in space. After all, we’re pretty sure the universe is mostly composed of dark matter and dark energy that we haven’t directly detected. But new research seems to imply that there are entirely…
In September, the Chinese Academy of Sciences president Chunli Bai, and President Anton Zeilinger of the Austria Academy of Sciences in Vienna, made the first quantum-secured video call. But when will you get to take part in this? Will there ever be a secure quantum Slack at your workplace?
It can be easy to take hyped-up science papers as fact, especially when they involve the most esoteric imaginable ideas. But scientists are taking issue with a hyped-up new paper that claims it can eliminate the need for dark matter or dark energy in our Universe.
You might not want anyone to read the work you put together as a university student—I sure don’t. But we’re not Stephen Hawking, world-famous physicist, whose Ph.D thesis you can now read for free online.
Even if you don’t know much physics, you probably know one of its core tenets: an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion. In fact, in a vacuum where there’s literally nothing to slow things down, things don’t prefer being at rest or in motion. This plays out in real life all the…
You are very lucky that you ended up about the size that you are today, somewhere between one and ten feet tall and weighing somewhere between one and one thousand pounds. This is a very good size. Not to body shame, but if you were, say, a quadrillion times shorter and weighed a nonillion times less (that’s one…
We all know about the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong forces between atoms. But could there be a fifth force still waiting to be discovered? A new experiment performed in Hungary suggests this may very well be the case.
Earlier this year, scientists confirmed the presence of gravitational waves, a cosmological feature first predicted by Albert Einstein. In recognition of this remarkable achievement, the scientists involved in the study have won the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize.
Ever feel like an insanely high powered laser could solve your problems? Fusion researchers sure do! And now, they may have the blueprint they’ve been searching for. New theoretical work indicates it could be possible to build a laser that heats materials to temperatures hotter than the center of the sun—within a…
H.G. Wells coined the term "time machine" all the way back in 1895, just a decade before Einstein published his groundbreaking paper on special relativity that would begin show how time travel is possible. The fascination with using technology to look into the past or the future hasn't faded in the last century. And…
A new study puts the unified model of black holes, a.k.a the doughnut model, on trial and concludes that black holes are (disappointingly) perhaps not all shaped like a box of glazed donuts flung into the air. So what are they shaped like?
Back in 1934, a team of physicists came up with an idea for how one might create matter from light. Put simply, just slam two photons into each other to get an electron and a positron, a.k.a. matter. And now, some 80 years later, a team of physicists have a plan to carry out the experiment in real life.
Does our galaxy center around a mass of dark matter? A new analysis that examines the steady stream of gamma rays that the Fermi Space Telescope has been picking up since its launch six years ago suggests that it might.
We know a few things about what happens when a black hole encounters another object in space. But what would happen if that object was, in fact, also a black hole?
Chris Adami, a theoretical physicist and computational biologist, is here today to take our questions about what goes on in black holes, information theory, and his proposed solution to the black hole information paradox posed by Stephen Hawking.
Biophysicists theorize that plants tap into the eerie world of quantum entanglement during photosynthesis. But the evidence to date has been purely circumstantial. Now, scientists have discovered a feature of plants that cannot be explained by classical physics alone — but which quantum mechanics answers quite nicely.
Over at Quanta Magazine, Natalie Wolchover has authored a stunning feature on the "amplituhedron" – a jewel-shaped, geometric object that could give scientists a new perspective on the quantum world, while "[challenging] the notion that space and time are fundamental constituents of nature."
Conventional thinking says the Universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang. But theoretical astrophysicist Christof Wetterich says it's not expanding at all. It’s just that the mass of all the particles within it is steadily increasing.
Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss – author of The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing, and producer of The Unbelievers – participated in one of reddit's Ask Me Anything chats last night. He fielded a slew of fantastic question in the process, offering his thoughts on what it's like to travel with…
A group of theoretical physicists at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University have proposed a new theory on the origin of the universe that could overturn the Big Bang model. This new idea, which piggybacks off the nascent field of quantum graphity, suggests that the early universe went through a dramatic…
