Posts

Two entirely different ways of “weighing” the cosmos are producing disparate results. If more precise measurements fail to resolve the discrepancy, physicists may have to revise the standard model of cosmology, our best description of the universe. “If this really is a glimpse of the standard model breaking down, that would be potentially revolutionary,” says astronomer Hendrik Hildebrandt of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Similar concerns over the correctness of the standard model have been raised over the past few years by two independent calculations of the so-called Hubble constant, or the rate at which the universe is expanding today....

BETTER BATTERIES are the key to electric cars that can drive for hundreds of miles between rechargings, but progress on existing technology is annoyingly incremental, and breakthroughs are a distant prospect. A new way of organizing the guts of modern batteries, however, has the potential to double the amount of energy such batteries can store. The idea came to Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Yet-Ming Chiang while he was on sabbatical at A123 Systems, the battery company he co-founded in 2001....

Key concepts Chemistry Acids Bases Chemical reactions Introduction Did you know there are thousands of different types of soda around the world? Do you think you would like cheese-flavored soda? What about octopus-flavored soda? Although flavors might differ from country to country, one thing all sodas have in common is the bubbles! Soda isn’t soda without that fizz—but have you ever wondered how they create those bubbles? In this activity you will make your own bubbly drink while exploring the reactions that create that famous fizz....

An enormous international database launched today will help epidemiologists to answer burning questions about the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, such as how rapidly new variants spread among people, whether vaccines protect against them and how long immunity to COVID-19 lasts. Unlike the global COVID-19 dashboard maintained by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and other popular trackers that list overall COVID-19 infections and deaths, the new repository at the data-science initiative called Global....

LOGIC OF LUCK The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane by Matthew Hutson. Hudson Street Press, 2012 ($25.95) We evolved to be self-aware, to know that we exist. Science journalist Hutson argues that this adaptation came at a price: we cannot imagine our own nonexistence. In his new book, he writes that our self-awareness causes us to search for meaning in life and to cling to the idea that we must be here for a reason....

Years of shifting and smoothing Georgia red clay paid off today, as the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) voted to allow construction of two new nuclear reactors (pdf) at the Plant Vogtle nuclear power station near Augusta. Atlanta–based utility giant Southern Co. will soon have permission to complete construction and operate two AP1000 type nuclear reactors designed by Westinghouse. But what were initially lauded as the first reactors of a nuclear renaissance when proposed are more likely to be the exceptions that prove the rule of no new nuclear construction in the U....

For any country that may be considering acquiring its first nuclear reactor, Russia’s annual ATOMEXPO offers a seemingly simple solution. At a recent event, thousands of people from around the world flocked to a giant, czarist-era exhibition hall. A visitor could hear vendors such as Rolls-Royce talk about steam generators, watch reporters interview experts for a Russian nuclear-themed television program or pick up a “Miss Atom” calendar featuring the year’s prettiest Russian nuclear workers....

One of the more irksome results of quantum mechanics is the revelation that reality is largely a persistent illusion. Quantum mechanics is not merely a theory of the microscopic: all matter is fundamentally quantum—it just so happens that weird quantum effects are hard to observe in anything bigger than a few atoms. Like the flickering silhouettes on the wall in Plato’s allegory of the cave, the existence of macroscopic, so-called “classical” objects is merely a shadow cast by their true quantum forms....

This cloud has nothing to do with the weather. It’s a cloud of snot, and when propelled by a sneeze, it can carry droplets 200 times farther than experts previously thought, according to research published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. After filming people coughing and sneezing at high speed, mathematicians and engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ran mathematical models and simulations to investigate the cloud’s role. Approaching the violent respiratory event from a fluid mechanics perspective, the researchers found that some previous assumptions about sneezes were wrong....

BOCA CHICA, Tx.—SpaceX’s latest Starship prototype, SN11, took to the skies over Texas on Tuesday morning (March 30), following a 24-hour delay. That wasn’t the first delay for the test. On Friday (March 25), SpaceX hoped to conduct the test flight after changing out one of the craft’s three Raptor engines. Ultimately the test was moved to Monday and then finally happened early Tuesday morning, when the Starship SN11 rocket blasted off from SpaceX’s Starbase test site near Boca Chica Village in South Texas at 8:00 a....

In the 1970s biologist Sydney Brenner and his colleagues began preserving tiny hermaphroditic roundworms known as Caenorhabditis elegans in agar and osmium fixative, slicing up their bodies like pepperoni and photographing their cells through a powerful electron microscope. The goal was to create a wiring diagram—a map of all 302 neurons in the C. elegans nervous system as well as all the 7,000 connections, or synapses, between those neurons. In 1986 the scientists published a near complete draft of the diagram....

Vice President & Publisher, Scientific American. Credit: Jason Varney Photography I cannot recall a situation more emblematic of the challenges of science journalism than the one pointed out to me by my physician during an office visit about five years ago. Knowing that I worked in the science media field, he presented me with two articles he had clipped from two different national daily papers, both published on the exact same day....

The Trump administration wants to eliminate a broad swath of the nation’s climate change research infrastructure, including satellites, education programs and science centers. Though it has little chance of being enacted, the Trump administration’s budget proposal unveiled yesterday targets hundreds of millions of dollars in climate science, renewable energy research and climate mitigation efforts across a variety of federal agencies, including NASA, NOAA, U.S. EPA and the departments of the Interior and Energy....

For fun, my husband and I have always followed the traditional themes for gifts marking significant wedding anniversaries, starting with paper, when he gave me a (still treasured) subscription to the New York Times. On our 20th, I was at first stumped by “china.” We already had plates. Maybe, I thought, I could focus on the place rather than porcelain? Horizons opened, and I settled on bestowing on him a 380-million-year-old former denizen of China: a fossil trilobite....

An extinct group of brawny carnivores could bite through bone, a cache of six-million-year-old fossilized feces reveals. The bone-crushing dogs, which include the genus Borophagus (“gluttonous eater”), occupied a niche in North America that has not been filled since. Most carnivores, including today’s dogs, sport long, pointy teeth that would likely shatter under the bite force needed to crack open large bones. In contrast, their Borophagus kin had thicker, flattened teeth, as well as shorter snouts that maximized their jaw power....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Toward the mid-1990s, America Online (by then going by its nickname, AOL) was the company through which most Americans accessed the internet. As many as half of the CD-ROMs produced at the time bore the near-ubiquitous AOL logo, offering early computer users the opportunity to surf the internet for a flat fee—at the time, US$19....

The last lonely bird of a species that once numbered three billion or more died on September 1, 1914. Martha, as she was known, had been the last passenger pigeon since her mate George died in 1910. The last of a social species, she lived out her days in solitary confinement in a cage in the Cincinnati Zoo. Her corpse—stuffed and primped—can now be seen at the Smithsonian Institution. But what if the passenger pigeon could be brought back?...

Every eight minutes in the U.S., a child under three has an accident related to baby products like strollers, carriers, cribs and walkers, a study suggests. That adds up to more than 66,000 injuries a year on average, and it only counts infants and toddlers who visit the emergency room. Injuries are on the rise, and roughly four in five are due to falls, researchers report in Pediatrics. “What’s surprising is how many children are still experiencing nursery product-related injuries serious enough to result in a trip to the emergency department - one every eight minutes,” said senior study author Dr....

Chris Rogers, a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University, and Jesse Jones, a musical instrument engineer, explain. Temperature can affect the sound of an instrument in a variety of ways, which are different for each instrument. It also influences the abilities of a player. In the case of the violin, for example, warmer weather changes the amount of friction between the bow and the strings, changing the way the bow pulls on each string....

By David Shepardson Feb 29 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Monday it bears “some responsibility” after one of its self-driving cars struck a municipal bus in a minor crash earlier this month. The crash may be the first case of one of its autonomous cars hitting another vehicle and the fault of the self-driving car. The Mountain View, California-based Internet search leader said it made changes to its software after the crash to avoid future incidents....