Tag: science

‘Amazing’ new technology set to transform the search for alien life

It has produced one of the most consistent sets of negative results in the history of science. For more than 60 years, researchers have tried to find a single convincing piece of evidence to support the idea that we share the universe with other intelligent beings. Despite these decades of effort, they have failed to make contact of any kind.

But the hunt for alien civilisations may be entering a new era, researchers believe. Scientists with Breakthrough Listen, the world’s largest scientific research programme dedicated to finding alien civilisations, say a host of technological developments are about to transform the search for intelligent life in the cosmos.

These innovations will be outlined at the group’s annual conference, which is to be held in the UK for the first time, in Oxford, this week. Several hundred scientists, from astronomers to zoologists, are expected to attend.

Astronomer Steve Croft, a project scientist with Breakthrough Listen, said: “There are amazing technologies that are under development, such as the construction of huge new telescopes in Chile, Africa and Australia, as well as developments in AI. They are going to transform how we look for alien civilisations.”

Keep reading

Researchers demonstrate how to build ‘time-traveling’ quantum sensors

The idea of time travel has dazzled sci-fi enthusiasts for years. Science tells us that traveling to the future is technically feasible, at least if you’re willing to go near the speed of light, but going back in time is a no-go. But what if scientists could leverage the advantages of quantum physics to uncover data about complex systems that happened in the past?

New research indicates that this premise may not be that far-fetched. In a paper published June 27, 2024, in Physical Review Letters, Kater Murch, the Charles M. Hohenberg Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for Quantum Leaps at Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues Nicole Yunger Halpern at NIST and David Arvidsson-Shukur at the University of Cambridge demonstrate a new type of quantum sensor that leverages quantum entanglement to make time-traveling detectors.

Murch describes this concept as analogous to being able to send a telescope back in time to capture a shooting star that you saw out of the corner of your eye. In the everyday world, this idea is a non-starter. But in the mysterious and enigmatic land of quantum physics, there may be a way to circumvent the rules. This is thanks to a property of entangled quantum sensors that Murch refers to as “hindsight.”

The process begins with entanglement of two quantum particles in a quantum singlet state—in other words, two qubits with opposite spin—so that no matter what direction you consider, the spins point in opposing directions. From there, one of the qubits—the “probe,” as Murch calls it—is subjected to a magnetic field that causes it to rotate.

Keep reading

Scientists successfully create a time crystal made of giant atoms

A crystal is an arrangement of atoms that repeats itself in space, in regular intervals: At every point, the crystal looks exactly the same. In 2012, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek raised the question: Could there also be a time crystal—an object that repeats itself not in space but in time? And could it be possible that a periodic rhythm emerges, even though no specific rhythm is imposed on the system and the interaction between the particles is completely independent of time?

For years, Frank Wilczek’s idea has caused much controversy. Some considered time crystals to be impossible in principle, while others tried to find loopholes and realize time crystals under certain special conditions.

Now, a particularly spectacular kind of time crystal has successfully been created at Tsinghua University in China, with the support from TU Wien in Austria.

The team used laser light and special types of atoms, namely Rydberg atoms, with a diameter that is several hundred times larger than normal. The results have been published in the journal Nature Physics.

Keep reading

Federal Science Agency Begins Selling ‘Most Carefully Quantified Cannabis Ever Sold’—For $174 A Gram

As part of an ongoing effort to help testing laboratories more reliably determine the potency and purity of marijuana and hemp, a federal science agency has begun selling packages of what it’s calling “some of the most carefully quantified cannabis ever sold.”

Picking up 4.5 grams of the stuff will cost $783, or $174 a gram—far more expensive than the cannabis that’s commercially available in states across the country.

The hemp product, sold by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), isn’t intended for consumption. Rather, it’s a tool to help labs calibrate their analyses of cannabinoids and toxic elements in both hemp and higher-THC marijuana.

“To ensure that their measurement methods are working properly, labs can analyze a bit of this material,” NIST said in a press release about its new offering, known as hemp plant reference material, or RM 8210. “If their numbers match those from NIST to within an accepted margin of error, all is well. If not, they’ll know they need to recalibrate their instruments or otherwise troubleshoot their methods.”

For just under $800, a lab receives three 1.5-gram sample packages of hemp. The samples are carefully measured by NIST for a variety of chemical components, including eight individual cannabinoids such as CBD and delta-9 THC, as well as 13 different toxic elements, like arsenic and heavy metals.

“Although this reference material is composed of hemp,” NIST said in its release, “labs can use it to validate their measurements of both hemp and marijuana, and it will help companies in the fast-growing cannabis industry and state regulators ensure that cannabis products are safe and accurately labeled.”

NIST biologist Colleen Bryan, who was part of the team the developed the reference material, said that consumers ought to be able to rely on what’s printed on product labels.

“If you buy a product that claims to have 25 milligrams of CBD per dose, you should be able to trust that number,” Bryan said, noting that some people use cannabis for medical reasons and may be particularly concerned about safety. “This reference material will help ensure that the cannabis they buy does not contain unsafe levels of toxic elements.”

Keep reading

NASA spots unexpected X-shaped structures in Earth’s upper atmosphere — and scientists are struggling to explain them

A NASA satellite has spotted unexpected X- and C-shaped structures in Earth’s ionosphere, the layer of electrified gas in the planet’s atmosphere that allows radio signals to travel over long distances.

The ionosphere is an electrified region of Earth’s atmosphere that exists because radiation from the sun strikes the atmosphere. Its density increases during the day as its molecules become electrically charged. That’s because sunlight causes electrons to break off of atoms and molecules, creating plasma that enables radio signals to travel over long distances. The ionosphere’s density then falls at night — and that’s where GOLD comes in.

NASA’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission is a geostationary satellite that has been measuring densities and temperatures in Earth’s ionosphere since its launch in October 2018. From its geostationary orbit above the western hemisphere, GOLD was recently studying two dense crests of particles in the ionosphere, located north and south of the equator. As night falls, low-density bubbles appear within these crests that can interfere with radio and GPS signals. However, it’s not just the wax and wane of sunshine that affects the ionosphere — the atmospheric layer is also sensitive to solar storms and huge volcanic eruptions, after which the crests can merge to form an X shape.

In its new observations, GOLD found some of these familiar X shapes in the ionosphere — even though there weren’t any kinds of solar or volcanic disturbances to create them.

Related: Oops! US Space Force may have accidentally punched a hole in the upper atmosphere

“Earlier reports of merging were only during geomagnetically disturbed conditions,” Fazlul Laskar, a research scientist at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), said in a statement. Laskar is the lead author of a paper published in April in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics that described these unexpected observations. 

Keep reading

From Fauci to Levine, feds covertly bend science to politics on COVID origin, gender confusion

Federal pressure on private parties to squelch challenges to Biden administration narratives, tacitly tolerated by the Supreme Court in a decision last month making it harder for social media users to sue public officials, goes beyond COVID-19, elections and Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

It also includes how to treat children with so-called “gender confusion,” as revealed by legal discovery in a lawsuit challenging Alabama’s ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for those under 19 – what supporters call gender-affirming care, which also includes surgical removal of healthy breasts and genitals.

A YouGov poll last month found most Americans agree with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s position on the issue – banning “hormonal or surgical treatment for transgender minors” – while fewer than one-third back President Biden’s opposition.

Unlike the murky role played by then-National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci in virus researchers suddenly changing their minds about SARS-CoV-2’s origin, Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine’s demands heavily influenced a transgender health group’s last-minute decision to lower its standards for minors.

Also influential was the American Academy of Pediatrics’ threat to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to oppose the eighth version of WPATH’s Standards of Care, which are widely relied upon globally by gender clinics, healthcare providers and insurers, if the final version of SOC 8 kept the age minimums in the draft.

The two organizations closely collaborate, according to emails between their leadership obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation through a public records request to West Virginia University, which employs a WPATH U.S. affiliate board member and AAP Committee on State Government Affairs member.

While scientists on the Feb. 1, 2020 conference call with Fauci had a potential personal interest in discrediting the COVID lab-leak theory – Fauci’s discretion over NIAID research grants – communications between staff for Levine and WPATH don’t suggest the latter feared financial retribution from Levine.

Keep reading

Earth’s core has slowed so much it’s moving backward, scientists confirm. Here’s what it could mean

Deep inside Earth is a solid metal ball that rotates independently of our spinning planet, like a top whirling around inside a bigger top, shrouded in mystery.

This inner core has intrigued researchers since its discovery by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936, and how it moves — its rotation speed and direction — has been at the center of a decades-long debate. A growing body of evidence suggests the core’s spin has changed dramatically in recent years, but scientists have remained divided over what exactly is happening — and what it means.

Part of the trouble is that Earth’s deep interior is impossible to observe or sample directly. Seismologists have gleaned information about the inner core’s motion by examining how waves from large earthquakes that ping this area behave. Variations between waves of similar strengths that passed through the core at different times enabled scientists to measure changes in the inner core’s position and calculate its spin.

Keep reading

GAME-CHANGING CERN EXPERIMENTS OFFER PHYSICISTS UNPRECEDENTED NEW INSIGHTS INTO THE UNIVERSE’S MYSTERIES

Significant recent advancements spearheaded with support from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, are revealing deeper insights into the fundamental nature of our universe.

The ongoing experiments at CERN aim to explore the smallest building blocks of matter and the forces governing them. Unveiling the dynamics of these forces is allowing scientists to inch toward a better fundamental understanding of the universe’s origins, structure, and behavior.

An intergovernmental organization, CERN is home to the largest and most advanced particle physics laboratory found anywhere in the world. It also houses the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-kilometer ring comprised of superconducting magnets that researchers working at the facility use to boost the energy of particles, enabling experiments that cannot be achieved anywhere else on Earth and which reveal clues about some of the most intriguing questions physicists have about the nature of matter and energy.

In recent weeks, an ongoing series of achievements made possible by CERN has marked significant strides toward resolving these lingering questions about the cosmos. In April, researchers working at the facility announced a new milestone in measuring the electroweak mixing angle, in new findings that will further refine scientists’ understanding of the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

The achievement, part of an ongoing collaboration with researchers from the University of Rochester and global members of the particle physics community, will help to shed light on the conditions that immediately followed the explosive birth of our universe and shed new insights into the lingering mysteries of particle physics.

Led by University of Rochester experimental particle physicist Arie Bodek, the work was carried out with support from Europe’s premier particle physics laboratory and the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN facility and was part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration.

A key element of the Standard Model, the electroweak mixing angle, also called the Weinberg angle, is used by physicists to describe the relative strength of the electromagnetic and weak forces, as well as how they combine to form the electroweak interaction. Measuring this is helpful in terms of understanding the universe’s fundamental forces and how they work together at extremely small scales, which scientists hope will offer deeper insights into the properties of matter and energy.

Such insights could greatly improve our understanding of the Standard Model, which describes our current best understanding of particle interactions and predicts numerous phenomena in physics and astronomy.

Keep reading

Does Weed Cause Strokes and Heart Attacks?

Thirty years ago, the sociologist Craig Reinarman observed that there’s something “woven into the very fabric of American culture” that makes us susceptible to believing that a “chemical boogeyman” is to blame for “society’s ills.” He added that every moral panic about drugs since the 19th century has been fueled by “media magnification” in which the danger of a particular substance is dramatized and distorted.

Now that recreational marijuana is legal in about half of U.S. states, and more Americans are consuming weed than ever before, the chemical bogeyman is back, and he’s armed with a new paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association by researchers from Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco.

This study, which was amplified in The New York Times and The Washington Post, commits so many egregious statistical errors that it’s a poster child for junk science. The paper would be comical if it didn’t offer bad medical advice. The researchers did almost everything wrong.

Which is not to say that the authors committed fraud or misconduct. In fact, they did exactly what Ph.D. students are taught to do, what journal editors look for, what referees approve, what universities reward, and what granting agencies fund. Because the paper uses conventional methods to arrive at false conclusions, it speaks to the profound crisis in academic research.

We’ve forgotten that the point of scientific studies isn’t seeking the approval of institutions. It’s the pursuit of truth.

Keep reading

WARP THEORISTS SAY WE’VE ENTERED AN EXOTIC PROPULSION SPACE RACE TO BUILD THE WORLD’S FIRST WORKING WARP DRIVE

An international team of physicists behind several revolutionary warp drive concepts, including the first to require no exotic matter, says that recent unprecedented breakthroughs in physics and propulsion have launched the world powers into a Cold War-style, 21st-century space race to build the world’s first working warp drive.

“We have a space race brewing,” said Gianni Martie, the founder of the Applied Physics (AP) think tank and co-author on a pair of forthcoming warp drive research papers, in an email to The Debrief. “There’s still a ton to discover and invent, but we have the next steps now, which we didn’t have before.”

Comprised of over 30 physicists and scientists in related disciplines, the AP team has gained a sizeable reputation in the warp theory community due to their highly regarded, peer-reviewed papers on numerous warp drive concepts. One of those concepts recently reported by The Debrief has gained significant attention, inspiring many researchers and scientists to declare the team’s “constant velocity warp drive model” as the first practical, viable warp drive concept ever proposed.

The AP team has also created the Warp Factory, a set of development and simulation tools that allow fellow researchers in this nascent field to evaluate the physics of their own models, which can greatly improve the model’s quality and viability.

In an effort to better understand the history of warp theory, the scientific viability of the most current warp drive concepts, what the media always gets wrong about this category of research, and what the next steps in this potential space race might look like, The Debrief reached out to the team at Applied Physics, resulting in an exchange that suggests the futuristic science familiar to viewers of Star Trek may be closer than we think.

Keep reading