An international team of astronomers have made the most precise test of gravity outside our own solar system. By combining data taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, their results show that gravity in this galaxy behaves as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, confirming the […]
A LONG time ago, in a galaxy far away, two black holes collided. We know this because more than a billion years later, on the morning of 14 September 2015, we felt it: in the world’s most exquisitely sensitive measuring device, laser beams shifted ever so slightly as ripples in space-time washed over Earth. This […]
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have helped to find the last reservoir of ordinary matter hiding in the universe. Ordinary matter, or “baryons,” make up all physical objects in existence, from stars to the cores of black holes. But until now, astrophysicists had only been able to locate about two-thirds of the matter […]
Over the past few years, physicists have predicted that a new form of matter called time crystals may have potential applications in quantum computing. Now in a new study, physicists Raditya Weda Bomantara and Jiangbin Gong at the National University of Singapore have taken some of the first steps toward showing exactly how that might […]
Microsoft has overhauled its MSN News app for mobile. As you might expect, it’s curated for your interests, offers breaking news alerts, support for widgets on both Android and iOS, continuous scrolling and a dark theme for reading at night. A blog post from Microsoft is quick to point out that its News service uses […]
Instagram is ready to compete head-on with YouTube. Today at a flashy event in San Francisco, the company announced it will begin allowing users to upload videos up to one hour in length, up from the previous one-minute limit. And to house the new longer-form videos from content creators and the general public, Instagram is […]
Experiments by Sam Dillavou and Shmuel Rubinstein at Harvard University have, for the first time, revealed that the friction between two surfaces has a “memory”. This means that the force can depend not only on the present state of the interface but also on how the interface has reached its current state. This new insight […]
Your smartphone has a particle detector on it, and scientists want you to help them uncover how the universe really works and maybe even discover the true nature of dark matter. There are just a few bugs to work out. High-energy particles from space, called cosmic rays, constantly bombard the Earth. There are all sorts […]
EPFL physicists have found a way to reverse electron spins using electric fields for the first time, paving the way for programmable spintronics technologies. Spintronics is a field of physics that studies the spin of electrons, an intrinsic type of magnetism that many elementary particles have. The field of spintronics has given rise to technological […]
We’ve seen supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies tearing stars to shreds. We’ve detected the energy wave from relatively tiny black holes slamming together to create a wobble in space-time a billion light-years away. But what about the medium-sized black holes in between these extremes? Scientists have been looking for such objects, and […]
Physicists working at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the US say they have passed another important milestone in their quest for nuclear fusion energy. They have shown that the fusion energy generated by the laser implosion of a deuterium-tritium fuel capsule is twice that of the kinetic energy of the implosion. By further trebling […]
Physicists are both thrilled and baffled by a new report from a neutrino experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. The MiniBooNE experiment has detected far more neutrinos of a particular type than expected, a finding that is most easily explained by the existence of a new elementary particle: a “sterile” neutrino that’s […]
