Science and the Origins of Life ...

THE multiverse is dead, long live the multiverse. A radical new way of looking at quantum mechanics suggests that even the multiverse will come to an end

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This is how the universe will end: not with a bang but a rip...

First the galaxies are destroyed. Then the solar system breaks apart and the Earth explodes. Finally, the atoms themselves are ripped apart.

It is predicated on a type of “phantom” dark energy that gets stronger over time. In this case, the expansion rate of the universe becomes so great that in 22 billion years or so material objects begin to fall apart and individual atoms disassemble themselves into unbound elementary particles and radiation.

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5 Reasons Why An International Space Station Should Really Orbit The Moon

If the $100 billion International Space Station (ISS) had been constructed to orbit our Moon instead of Earth, prospects for the U.S.’ human spaceflight program would arguably be much brighter than today.

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Mystery Deepens: Matter and Antimatter Are Mirror Images

Matter and antimatter appear to be perfect mirror images of each other as far as anyone can see, scientists have discovered with unprecedented precision, foiling hope of solving the mystery as to why there is far more matter than antimatter in the universe.

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Advanced alien civilizations rare or absent in the local universe

Sensitive new telescopes now permit astronomers to detect the waste heat that is expected to be a signature of advanced alien civilizations that can harness enormous energies on the scale of the stellar output of their own galaxy. Professor Michael Garrett (ASTRON General & Scientific Director) has used radio observations of candidate galaxies to show that such advanced civilizations are very rare or entirely absent from the local universe.

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Where the Higgs belongs

Bosons are particles that carry the four fundamental forces. These forces push and pull what would otherwise have been an unwieldy soup of particles into the beautiful mosaic of stars and galaxies that permeate the visible universe.

The fundamental forces keep protons incredibly stable (the strong force holds them together), cause compasses to point north (the electromagnetic force attracts the needle), make apples fall off trees (gravity attracts the fruit to the ground), and keep the sun shining (the weak force allows nuclear fusion to occur).

The Higgs is called a boson because of a quantum mechanical property called spin—which represents a particle’s intrinsic angular momentum and characterizes how a particle plays with its Standard Model friends.

Bosons have an integer spin (0, 1, 2) which makes them the touchy-feely types. They have no need for personal space. Fermions, on the other hand, have a non-integer spin (1/2, 3/2, etc.), which makes them a bit more isolated; they prefer to keep their distance from other particles.

The Higgs has a spin of 0, making it officially a boson.

“Every boson is associated with one of the four fundamental forces,” says Kyle Cranmer, an associate professor of physics at New York University. “So if we discover a new boson, it seems natural that we should find a new force.”

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Experiment confirms fundamental symmetry in nature

Scientists working with ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), a heavy-ion detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring, have made precise measurements of particle mass and electric charge that confirm the existence of a fundamental symmetry in nature.

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Ion space drive is said to break fuel efficiency record

"The current record, held by NASA's HiPEP system, allows 9600 (+/- 200) seconds of specific impulse. However, results recorded by the Neumann Drive have been as high as 14,690 (+/- 2000), with even conservative results performing well above NASA's best. That suggests the drive is using fuel far more efficiently, allowing for it to operate for longer. Furthermore NASA's HiPEP runs on Xenon gas, while the Neumann Drive can be powered on a number of different metals, the most efficient tested so far being magnesium."

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Eleven-year cosmic search leads to black hole rethink

One hundred years since Einstein proposed gravitational waves as part of his general theory of relativity, an 11-year search performed with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) Parkes telescope has shown that an expected background of waves is missing, casting doubt on our understanding of galaxies and black holes

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A new study predicts a quantum Goldilocks effect

By studying a system that couples matter and light together, like the universe itself, researchers have now found that crossing a quantum phase transition at intermediate speeds generates the richest, most complex structure. Such structure resembles "defects" in an otherwise smooth and empty space. The findings are published in Physical Review A, the American Physical Society's main journal.

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Could the Universe Be Lopsided?

Could the early moments of the universe have been chaotic, and then somehow regularized over time, like a smoothed-out pudding? Misner initially thought so, until he realized that the Mixmaster Universe couldn’t smooth out on its own. However, it could have started out “lopsided,” then been stretched out during an era of ultra-rapid expansion called inflation until its irregularities were lost from sight.

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As cosmologists have collected data from instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope, Planck Satellite, and WMAP satellite (now retired), the bulk of the evidence supports the idea that our universe is indeed isotropic. But a minority of researchers have used measurements of the velocities of galaxies and other observations, such as an odd line up of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background dubbed the “Axil of Evil” to assert that the universe could be slightly irregular after all.

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How The Higgs Gives Mass To The Universe

The Higgs field is like rain — a constant, unavoidable rain — and there is no place you can go to keep dry. Just like there’s no way to shield yourself from gravitation, there’s no way to hide from the rain that is the Higgs field.

If there were no Higgs field at all, all the fundamental particles would be like dried-out sponges. Massless (you have to use your imagination), dried-out sponges.

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New model suggests dark matter is made of electrically charged particles

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) believe that dark matter may be composed of electrically charged particles that are bound by a yet-unknown force and have somehow managed to escape detection. The theory could be verified with the help of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator.

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NASA and ESA will move a small Moon by slamming a spacecraft into it

We've smashed into the moon, and bounced onto a comet, but a whole 17 years after Deep Impact and Armageddon debuted in 1998, we still haven't managed to change the course of an asteroid.

Sure, we landed the NEAR-Shoemaker orbiter on an asteroid in 2001, but we didn't even try to see if we could change its orbit. Come on, everyone, we can do better. Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA have announced plans to fill that gaping hole in our asteroid knowledge by smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid's moon and watching what happens.

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How the neutrino could solve great cosmic mysteries and win its next Nobel Prize

While travelling through space, a neutrino apparently continuously flips between different "types" of neutrino, changing the way they interact with matter. This is called neutrino oscillations. You might imagine this as a little fellow that, while running at nearly the speed of light, continuously changes the colour of its jacket by which you are trying to identify it. Neutrinos can only do this if they have mass. So until the results from these experiments were published, they were assumed to be massless.

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Can Our Universe Be a 5D Black Hole?

It is a well-known fact that if you fall into a black hole, there is no possibility of escaping from it. Such a fall will immediately lead to the disintegration of your body due to strong tension forces. But there are now some ideas about the possibility of living in a black hole provided you find a 5D black hole. In a 5D black hole, these forces can be neglected at small distances, allowing you to continue your movement and research inside the black hole. But even more surprising is that some mathematical theories indicate that our whole universe may indeed be a 5D black hole.

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Early Universe Created After Big Bang Was in Liquid Form? New Experiments At LHC Creates Smallest Ever Droplets

Researchers had been struggling to create the primordial soup of subatomic particles that occurred just after the Big Bang called the quark-gluon plasma. However, when they inspected the subsequent material, they were astonished to see that it acted more like a liquid than a gas in droplets consisted of just 100 to 200 subatomic particles.

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Do we live in one of many Parallel Universes?

The existence of parallel universes may seem like something cooked up by science fiction writers, with little relevance to modern theoretical physics. But the idea that we live in a “multiverse” made up of an infinite number of parallel universes has long been considered a scientific possibility – although it is still a matter of vigorous debateamong physicists. The race is now on to find a way to test the theory, including searching the sky for signs of collisions with other universes.

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Where Are the Missing Gravitational Waves?

Gravitational waves stretch and squeeze space, causing the distance between us and the neutron star to change. The gravitational waves we were looking for should have altered that distance by about ten metres, a tiny fraction given that this neutron star is about 3.6 x 1019 metres from Earth (that’s 3.6 with 19 zeros following)! But this should have been enough to show up in our measurements.

Yet the fact that our measurements are so accurate tells us that something is wrong with the theory. This doesn’t mean that gravitational waves don’t exist. There are other facets of our understanding of the universe that might be off track.

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Physicists have learned how to restore the entanglement of 'untangled' quantum light

Scientists from the Russian Quantum Center (Moscow), lead by Prof. Alexander Lvovsky, have developed a method to restore quantum entanglement and have tested this method in an experiment. This research significantly broadens the possibilities of quantum communication and quantum cryptography. The results are published in Nature Photonics.

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