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At least four times in the last few years, astronomers have announced they have found planets orbiting other stars in the sweet spot known as the habitable zone — not too hot, not too cold — where water and thus perhaps life are possible. In short, a so-called Goldilocks planet fit to be inhabited by…
Two diamonds as wide as earring studs have been made to share the spooky quantum state known as entanglement. The feat, performed at room temperature, blurs the divide between the classical and quantum worlds, since typically the quantum link has been made with much smaller particles at low temperatures.
In his new book, The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, Oxford physicist Frank Close reviews decades’ worth of brain-teasing theories and looks ahead to puzzles yet to be solved.
In the last few weeks major reports by the International Energy Agency and the UN Environment Programme have concluded that we can still meet the UN’s target of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. But climate scientists are far less optimistic. Many say the chance to avoid a 2 degrees Celsius rise…
Dark matter is slowly running out of places to hide. Two new looks at the gamma-ray sky suggest that if the mysterious matter is a particle, it is heavier than 40 gigaelectronvolts, about 44 times the mass of a proton.
When it comes to money, creative people are more likely to cheat to get it than the less-imaginative crowd, a new study suggests. The reason? Creative types may be more skilled at coming up with reasons for their less-than-ethical actions, according to the researchers.
Brain researchers and philosophers of mind have focused on brain processes, neural computations, and their correspondences with the physical world. But what if we should be focusing on what is not there instead?
Climate adaptation: reconfiguring our world’s economies and policies to work under a more extreme climate. While that might seem like an old conversation, it’s not; mitigation—reducing greenhouse gases—has been the main topic of climate discussion in the past 20 years. But attention is shifting to the once taboo topic of adaptation.
David Weinberger is one of our most incisive thinkers about the digital age, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the author of books such as Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, and the upcoming Too Big to Know. Technology editor Michael…
At first glance, CS 22892-052 looks like a run-of-the-mill old star. Born about 13 billion years ago, only 700 million years after the big bang, it is lacking in many of the shinier, more interesting elements. But look closer, and you’ll see that this stellar granny is adorned with gold. Now Terese Hansen of the…