Exhibition of LHCb events from 2011 showing a B meson decaying into a pair of muons and antimuons. Credit: CERN The Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN is the world’s largest experiment in quark flavor physics with an extensive particle physics program. His data from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Runs 1 and 2 …
Large Hadron Collider Beauty releases first dataset to the public Read More »
An MIT study reveals that, for now, the catalog of known black hole binaries does not reveal anything fundamental about how black holes form. Pictured is a simulation of light emitted by a supermassive black hole binary system where the surrounding gas is optically thin (transparent). Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Clues to a …
Without more data, a black hole’s origins can be “rotated” in any direction Read More »
On October 4, 80-year-old John F. Clauser woke up in his California home to find he had received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He will receive the award at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 10 with Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect for their work on quantum entanglement. It was a moment of celebration …
Schematic of a generic superconducting nanowire single photon detector. The leads in this study were made entirely of tungsten silicide, with no gold contacts. Credit: S. Kelley/NIST For decades, astronomers and physicists have tried to solve one of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos: around 85% of its mass is missing. Many astronomical observations indicate …
In new studies, researchers explore new ways to hunt dark matter Read More »
In situ mass leucine incorporation rates normalized to rates obtained under atmospheric pressure conditions. The symbols correspond to the different research expeditions. The regression equation is a power law function: Pin situ = 494z−0.321 (not= 56, number of samples incubated in situ), where Pin situis the percentage of leucine incorporation rate in situ normalized to …
Ocean study shows most deep-sea microbes are nearly inactive Read More »
SEAN CARROLL: There’s no doubt that the multiverse is having something of a moment in popular culture. You know, the Marvel movies leaned into that. “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”, various Spider-Man films, but also “Rick and Morty” and “Everything Everywhere All At Once”. You might think it’s physics’ fault because physicists have …
By Shankar Das Sarma The laws of physics may not be what they seem Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images I was recently reading an old article by string theorist Robbert Dijkgraaf in Quanta Magazine titled “There are no laws of physics”. You might find it a little strange for a physicist to claim that there are no …
In 1983, the CIA wrote an obscure report on the “Gateway Experiment”, claiming that an altered state of human consciousness might be able to transcend space and time. Decades later, the document has since been declassified and is now experiencing a resurgence on social media. However, despite what you’ve seen on TikTok and YouTube, the …
Read the 1983 CIA report on space-time transcendence with your mind Read More »
Life is really weird. From a physicist’s point of view, it’s even stranger. Life is unlike any other phenomenon in physics. Stars, electrons, and black holes are all amazing in their own way. But only life invents, and the first thing life invents is itself. Life is creative in ways no other physical system can …
Information is the frontier for the study of life Read More »
Long-term light curve of J150052 from 2008. Credit: Cao et al, 2022 Using NASA’s Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescopes, astronomers from Radboud University in the Netherlands and elsewhere made X-ray observations of a tidal disturbance event designated 3XMM J150052.0+015452, or J150052 for short. The results show that J150052 was triggered by a rapidly rotating …
