This was originally written as my response to this page. I felt I was eloquent enough to repeat my rant here. Since this is one the deepest parts of myself and my personality, I could rant on and on about why science is so important to me. I could name endless anecdotes where I had [...]
So I’m not as well read in biology news as I am in physics news but occasionally I read news in biological research that is just fascinating to me. Extremophile creatures, critters that live in very dry, very hot, very cold or very radioactive environments, fascinate me because they show us the limits of earthly [...]
This just in for news of big scary machines of physics–something called, innocently enough, the Extreme Light Infrastructure. The ELI is a very powerful laser array that will concentrate 200 petawatts of laser power into a very small space-time in hopes of distorting the vacuum on the quantum scale. Let me unpack this a bit [...]
Sometime this year Earth’s human population passed 7 billion people. Sometime this year, for the first time, more than 50% of humanity lived in cities and towns. The predictions are that humanity’s population will peak around 10 billion or so in 2050 and then go into a slow decline. Even in the poorest parts of [...]
Yes, I think it can. Some have argued no. They say you could use a time machine and take baby from ancient China and raise it in our modern world. This baby would adapt just perfectly fine or at least just as well as all the rest of us have. And this is true. But [...]
So I just learned that IBM has built a new kind of experimental silicon chip that more closely models how neurons process and communicate information. Now, as a hard science fiction nerd, I’ve talked about computational neurology and the Blue Brain Project before but, this recent news seems particularly exciting to me because building something [...]
So they’ve found an extrasolar planet 750 light years away that surprisingly dark despite being so close to its sun. The planet is a jovian or superjovian (A gas giant, like Jupiter or Saturn.) only about 4.8 million kilometers away from its star. That’s barely a tenth the size of the orbit of Mercury. It’s [...]
Considering how long we’ve known that cosmic rays have been bombarding the Earth, scientists have long speculated that cosmic ray impacts with the nuclei of atoms and ions in our upper atmosphere should create small amounts of antimatter. This antimatter, mostly antiprotons, trapped by the magnetic field of our planet and largely in a vacuum, [...]
So last week a friend pointed out a news headline that read “Time travel is impossible” and he wanted my opinions on it. So first let’s explain what the team of scientists in Hong Kong demonstrated. Their experiment showed that individual photons, in a vacuum, always move at c, the speed of light. This was [...]
All the volcanism, seismic activity and tectonic plate movement on the Earth is driven by heat deep in the planet’s core. Until now the source of that heat in the core was thought to be two things: Primordial heat as the planet slowly cools over the eons from its accretion in the early solar system. [...]