Can we understand the universe? Read my blog to find out what we know, may one day know, and will probably never know.
The origin of life is one of the biggest mysteries left in science. Now a group of researchers says there wasn't just one originsttr, there were two. And I want to explain why, despite how impossibly long ago it all happened, I'm actually optimistic that we'll one day work out how life began. Let's take a look.
How special is Earth? It's one of those questions that runs through all of science, and here's a version of it most people have never thought about: why does our planet even have continents? A group of geologists now says the answer lies somewhere unexpected, in the shape of the Milky Way itself. Let's take a look.
The war on artificial intelligence is no longer just online arguments and complaints about data centers. Something has shifted, and law enforcement has noticed. Where did this new anti-technology movement come from, who's behind it, and where is it heading next? Let's take a look.
Neuroscientists have long assumed that when a brain region becomes more active, more blood flows to it. That assumption is the entire basis of functional magnetic resonance imaging. A new paper now says it's wrong for about 40% of the signals, and it isn't the only recent study to find that a lot of what we thought we knew about the brain rests on bad measurements. Let's take a look.
The dumber you are, the more certain you are that you aren't. That's the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it's been used to explain everything from bad politicians to the state of social media. Now psychologists have gone back to the biggest dataset we have and come out with the opposite conclusion. But there's a reason both sides can look at the same dots and see the opposite thing. Let's take a look.
A worker at a US government lab got bitten by a monkey carrying a deadly virus, and it turned out nobody knew what to do about it. Around the same time, someone from the same lab tried to smuggle outbreak samples into the country. All of this while everyone's worried about AI making bioweapons. Let's take a look.
One answer to the Fermi Paradox is that advanced civilizations develop AI and lose interest in space travel. A researcher now argues that's backwards: AI, robots, and cheap probes make space exploration easier. Which means the paradox gets worse.
Over the years, physicists have become increasingly enamored with “quantum weirdness,” the many strange features of quantum mechanics that are extremely hard to explain. In a new paper, a group of researchers have tried to cut through the weirdness by analyzing how causal order really works. By doing so, they hope to set up a deeper framework that can combine quantum mechanics with gravity. Let’s
A physicist built a mini-universe out of cold atoms and used it to test where time comes from. It made big headlines a few weeks ago, and I almost skipped it, as most "universe in a lab" stories are nonsense. But then I actually read the paper. Let's take a look.
Putin's former thesis advisor is convinced that oil never runs out, and Russia is now drilling 8 kilometres into the ground to prove him right. Is there really infinite oil down there, or is Russia about to end up with a very expensive hole? Let's take a look.
Everywhere, it turns out, is warming faster than the rest of the world. Every region, every country, all of them, faster than the rest. You may sense a slight problem with this. The headlines are real, the papers are real, and yet something doesn't add up. Let's take a look.
In today's video I talk about some commonly misunderstood points in the double slit experiment.
A federal judge in the US has allowed a whistleblower lawsuit to go forward, in which a former official of the National Institutes of Health accuses a Harvard professor of repurposing research grants and falsely claiming he had met his objectives. The allegations are unproven. But the reason this case matters is that everyone in academia knows this kind of thing happens all the time, and until
In Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity is always attractive. But according to a new paper, quantum mechanics offers a loophole that can create antigravity. And not only this, if it was measurable that would prove that gravity has quantum properties. How does this work and how can repulsive gravity be compatible with the laws of physics that we know and like? Let's take a look.
For over half a century, people taking the psychedelic drug DMT have reported meeting alien beings. Now a scientist says these aliens might be real, and that he has the mathematics to prove it. Forget string theory and extra dimensions; here come aliens and psychedelics. Let's take a look.
About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. To account for this observation, physicists came up with a new type of energy – called dark energy – which supposedly makes up more than 75% of the universe, and also has negative pressure. In a new paper, mathematicians claim that dark energy isn’t needed to explain that accelerating expansion, and
The electric car revolution was supposed to be inevitable. But over the past six months it's begun to look shaky. The clearest warning sign isn't sales figures, it's what carmakers are doing with their own money: writing off huge losses, scaling back their plans, and cancelling battery projects. So what's really happening to electric car demand, and is the slowdown temporary? Let's take a look.
You might think that black holes suck in light without letting it escape, but they actually concentrate light in the photon sphere which surrounds their horizon. In a recent paper, researchers created a new type of laser which concentrates light using a technique similar to those found in the photon sphere. Let’s take a look.
One of the biggest limitations of quantum quantum computing is the “no cloning” theorem, which says you cannot copy a quantum state without destroying the original. If you could copy quantum states without harming the original, much of the error-correcting complications in quantum computing could be avoided. Luckily, in a recent paper, physicists have demonstrated that there’s a way around the “
A new, computer-based calculation shows that our solar system used to have 5 or 6, rather than 4 gas giants. It seems that, billions of years ago, we lost two planets due to an instability that probably also tilted Uranus’s axis and scrambled up its moons. Let’s have a look.
Recently, a pair of researchers made a massive breakthrough in the foundations of physics. In their paper, they describe how gravity is an emergent property. More specifically, they say that the origin of gravity is entropy. And not just any entropy, but the entropy of quantum fields. How big is this really? Let’s take a look.
Physicists have been arguing about dark matter for almost a century, and now, after all this time, their most favourite evidence for dark matter – the Bullet Cluster – disappeared. This isn’t just an interesting development from a scientific perspective, it is also a good illustration for what is going wrong in this research area. I have a brief summary.
Quantum computing is supposed to be one of the most exciting new technologies that humanity is working on, with companies promising it can be used in chemistry, material science, logistics, and finance. Over the years, those use cases have been slowly eroded, but investment in quantum tech has only increased. Why? Let’s take a look.
Since the early days of quantum physics, some scientists have believed that there’s a link between quantum mechanics and consciousness. While most researchers don’t think this idea holds water, a few have published papers about how phosphate molecules in the brain could link consciousness to quantum physics. Let’s take a look.
In today's video I speculate about the future of AI
In 2011, three physicists won the Nobel Prize for showing that the expansion of the universe speeds up, which is usually attributed to aa mysterious type of energy called “dark energy”. But last year, though, a different group published research showing that universal expansion isn’t actually getting faster. Since then, the two groups have engaged in a whole bunch of back-and-forth refuting each