One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer. They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms […]
Black hole may not be at galaxy’s center There may be a fuzzy clump of dark matter, not a supermassive black hole, in the center of the Milky Way. Researchers say the dark matter could be made of fermions known as darkinos, which would possess milder gravitational forces that allow gas clouds like G2 to […]
NASA’s MOXIE creates breathable air on Mars The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, known as MOXIE, has successfully extracted about 5 grams of breathable oxygen from the atmosphere of Mars, something that could pave the way for future crewed missions to the Red Planet. Meanwhile, the Ingenuity took its second […]
There was no shortage of T. rexes in the Cretaceous Scientists estimate there may have been about 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rexes that lived into maturity during the Cretaceous, dominating the landscape for more than 2 million years. The mathematical model researchers used to reach their estimate is described in Science. Gizmodo Sagittarius A* gives up […]
When Cern’s gargantuan accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), fired up ten years ago, hopes abounded that new particles would soon be discovered that could help us unravel physics’ deepest mysteries. Dark matter, microscopic black holes and hidden dimensions were just some of the possibilities. But aside from the spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson […]
New observations of black hole reveal surprises Astronomers have recalculated the mass of the Cygnus X-1 black hole, the first black hole ever found, and they say it’s about one-and-a-half times more massive than once thought, detailing their findings in Science. Using observations by the Very Long Baseline Array, researchers say the Cygnus X-1 system […]
What we can learn about black holes from water in a tank Researchers can observe many properties of black holes through water simulations, since gravitational interactions behave like fluid. University of Nottingham scientists describe in Physical Review Letters how they witnessed backreaction for the first time by creating a vortex of water and propelling waves […]
2020 has been all about Covid-19. Almost. Nature produced an excellent piece to review an extraordinary year: A review of 2020 through Nature’s editorials Quanta Magazine has produced a set of articles to remind us that science, in general, has not stopped: 2020 Biology: While the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the most urgent […]
Need a particle accelerator? How about a black hole? Researchers have figured out a way it would be possible for black holes to act as particle accelerators. Previously, it was thought that only theoretical “extremal” black holes would be able to allow fast-moving particles to get near enough to the event horizon without falling in […]
New class of neutrinos observed A class of neutrinos generated from the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen process, far less common than the proton-proton chain, was discovered during the Borexino experiment. “With this outcome, Borexino has completely unraveled the two processes powering the sun,” says researcher Gioacchino Ranucci. Science News Getting energy from black hole possible […]