Another approach that aims to reconcile the apparent passage of time with the block universe goes by the name of causal set theory. First developed in the 1980s as an approach to quantum gravity by the physicist Rafael Sorkin —…
Science
The Prospects for Alien Life on Titan Keep Getting Better – Gizmodo
Now, Rahm’s models are showing that under Titan-like environmental conditions, polyimine is both flexible and good at absorbing sunlight. “It turns out, different conformations of this material absorb different wavelengths of light, including wavelengths that are accessible on the surface…
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Watch a cyborg stingray made of rat heart cells swim using light – New Scientist
Designed by Kevin Kit Parker from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute and his team, the 16-millimetre-long soft robot has a gold skeleton overlaid with a flexible polymer. Its muscles are made up of about 200,000 rat heart cells laid down in…
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Could we really call it a ‘temple’? – The Tepe Telegrams
As already noted in the beginning, we know little of the beliefs these people might have followed, so it would seem rather bold to denote these monumental pillar-statues as personifications of ‘deities’. But faceless, larger than life and highly abstract,…
Carbon nanotubes too weak to get a space elevator off the ground – New Scientist
The team’s simulations show that the kink acts as a weak point in the tube, easily snapping the normally strong carbon-carbon bonds. Once this happens, the bonds in the adjacent hexagons also break, unzipping the entire tube. The effect on…
Is Particle Physics About to Crack Wide Open? – Scientific American Blog Network
The importance of this result is clear to everybody working in the field and it has immediately triggered a huge amount of work on the possible implications. None of the more fundamental models that currently exist as possible replacements for…
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How we caught a glimpse of a supermassive black hole having a meal – The Conversation
Galaxy clusters such as Abell 2597 build up an extremely hot plasma around them, which some predict can gradually cool and rain down to feed the central supermassive black hole. We know from previous work that the black hole in…
Scientists weigh in against the NFL’s war on physics and Tom Brady – Quartz
“We provide this analysis to explain what the ‘science’ used by the league is not,” they write in their brief. “It most assuredly is not scientific proof that the Patriots’ footballs lost pressure beyond the drop caused naturally by the…
Europa’s Ocean May Have An Earthlike Chemical Balance – JPL
In a new study, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, compared Europa’s potential for producing hydrogen and oxygen with that of Earth, through processes that do not directly involve volcanism. The balance of these two elements is a…
Mind-blowing video of space junk evolution since 1957 – Business Insider
“The only way to [solve this problem] is to bring back the larger objects,” NASA scientist Donald Kessler, who has led NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office for nearly 20 years, told The Huffington Post in 2013. But if we’re going to do anything…