We’re often told it is “unscientific” or “meaningless” to ask what happened before the Big Bang. But a new paper by cosmologist Eugene Lim, of King’s College London, UK, and astrophysicists Katy Clough, of Queen Mary University of London, UK, and Josu Aurrekoetxea, at Oxford University, UK, proposes a way forward: using complex computer simulations […]
A team of scientists has discovered a new type of crystal that can “breathe”—releasing and absorbing oxygen repeatedly at relatively low temperatures. This unique ability could transform the way we develop clean energy technologies, including fuel cells, energy-saving windows, and smart thermal devices. The newly developed material is a special kind of metal oxide made […]
Astronomers have discovered potentially the most massive black hole ever detected. The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. It exists in one of the most massive galaxies […]
From fabricated research to paid authorships and citations, organized scientific fraud is on the rise. By combining large-scale data analysis of scientific literature with case studies, researchers led a deep investigation into scientific fraud. Although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on lone individuals, the Northwestern study instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and […]
“God does not play dice.” This famous remark by Albert Einstein critiqued the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. Paradoxically, his theory of relativity has become an essential tool for understanding the behaviour of electrons, the primary subjects of quantum mechanics. Electrons are so minuscule that their behaviour must be analysed through quantum mechanics, yet they […]
The Dead Sea is a confluence of extraordinary conditions: the lowest point on Earth’s land surface, with one of the world’s highest salinities. The high concentration of salt gives it a correspondingly high density, and the water body’s status as the deepest hypersaline lake gives rise to interesting and often temperature-related phenomena below the water’s […]
Can you prove whether a large quantum system truly behaves according to the weird and wonderful rules of quantum mechanics—or if it just looks like it does? In a new study, physicists from Leiden, Beijing and Hangzhou found the answer to this question. You could call it a “quantum lie detector”: Bell’s test designed by […]
For more than a century, a well-known 18-electron rule has guided the field of organometallic chemistry. Now, researchers at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), in collaboration with scientists from Germany, Russia, and Japan, have successfully synthesized a novel organometallic compound that challenges this longstanding principle. They have created a stable 20-electron derivative of […]
A new discovery of how bees use their flight movements to facilitate remarkably accurate learning and recognition of complex visual patterns could mark a major change in how next-generation AI is developed, according to a University of Sheffield study. By building a computational model—or a digital version of a bee’s brain—researchers have discovered how the […]
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have theoretically demonstrated that photons trapped inside an optical cavity carry detailed information about a material placed within it. By measuring the properties of the photons leaking out of the cavity, researchers can probe how an optical cavity modifies the properties […]