Author archives: Mapping Ignorance

A new study has revealed potential chemical signatures of ancient Martian microbial life in rocks examined by NASA’s Perseverance rover. The findings, published by a large international team of scientists, focus on a region of Jezero Crater known as the Bright Angel formation—a name chosen from locations in Grand Canyon National Park because of the […]

Imagine a clock that doesn’t have electricity, but its hands and gears spin on their own for all eternity. In a new study, physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have used liquid crystals, the same materials that are in your phone display, to create such a clock—or, at least, as close as humans can […]

Researchers at Institute of Science Tokyo have created a new material platform for non-volatile memories using covalent organic frameworks (COFs), which are crystalline solids with high thermal stability. The researchers successfully installed electric-field-responsive dipolar rotors into COFs. Due to the unique structure of the COFs, the dipolar rotors can flip in response to an electric […]

The Earth supports the only known life in the universe, all of it depending heavily on the presence of liquid water to facilitate chemical reactions. While single-celled life has existed almost as long as Earth itself, it took roughly three billion years for multicellular life to form. Human life has existed for less than one-10 […]

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 […]