AP Photo/Francois Mori, File/Alamy As the COP26 climate negotiations were taking place in Glasgow, UK, in November 2021, a new slogan entered the lexicon: “keep 1.5°C alive”. The phrase, on the lips of everyone from politicians to climate scientists, aimed...
Lasers can have a cooling effect in quantum experimentsMike_shots/Shutterstock In the strange world of quantum mechanics, nothing isn’t ever actually nothing — and now we have found that nothing, or the absence of a photon, can be used to cool...
Seen against the backdrop of Jupiter’s dramatic, swirling atmosphere, Europa might at first appear a bit drab. With its greyish-white surface, you might even say it resembles a well-worn cue ball in a run-down pool hall. On closer inspection, however,...
Composite image of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York and the particle tracks it detectsJoe Rubino and Jen Abramowitz/Brookhaven National Laboratory Our collection of antimatter has just gotten heavier, as researchers have logged the heaviest antimatter version of...
AI programs quickly lose the ability to learn anything newJiefeng Jiang/iStockphoto/Getty Images The algorithms that underpin artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT can’t learn as they go along, forcing tech companies to spend billions of dollars to train new models from...
Long covid’s effects seem to vary according to a person’s agedamircudic/Getty Images Long covid symptoms appear to differ substantially between younger children and adolescents. A better understanding of how the condition can present could aid diagnoses. To date, most long...
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.Plastic waste is piling up at a daunting pace around the world. The World Bank estimates that every person on the planet generates an...
August 21, 20242 min readHigh-Dimensional Sudoku Puzzle Proves Mathematicians Wrong about Long-Standing Geometry ProblemMathematicians reveal that tiling your multidimensional bathroom will lead to never-ending disorderBy Max Springer Christoph Hetzmannseder/Getty ImagesTiling a two-dimensional bathroom floor is a straightforward home renovation, but...
The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico detected radio signals similar to the Wow! signalNAIC/Arecibo Observatory/NSF An unexplained radio signal detected in 1977 known as the Wow! signal, which some have interpreted as an alien message, may have been the result...
The oldest known piece of Earth? A 4.4 billion-year-old zirconJohn Valley, University of Wisconsin-Madison Until recently, many discounted the idea that life could have existed on Earth before 3.8 billion years ago because it was thought that heavy pummelling from...
