From a serene view of planet Earth, through the heart of the Milky Way and out to far-flung galaxies, take an armchair tour of the Universe with these dazzling images
A new type of quantum bit called a “phase-slip qubit,” devised by researchers at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute and their collaborators, has enabled the world’s first-ever experimental demonstration of coherent quantum phase slip (CQPS). The groundbreaking result sheds light on an elusive phenomenon whose existence — a natural outcome of the hundred-year-old theory of…
Herb Silverman for On Faith’s Guest Voices, reflecting on the life and contributions of Paul Kurtz, who died October 20 at the age of 86: Paul Kurtz was a founder and a leader, more so than anyone else I have ever known. Before there were the new atheists and their best-selling books, there was Paul…
Because nature does not present the world in the form we would like, we must reorder it. To create this new order, we need information about what that order is supposed to look like, knowledge about how to build it and energy to get it into shape. Many technological revolutions of the past have focused…
Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with…
Falsified data is the main reason biomedical and life science research articles are retracted, a problem that has increased 10-fold in the past three decades, a review of studies found. About 43% of the articles were rescinded because of made-up or manipulated data, 14% were retracted because the study appeared in more than one publication…
Rice University researchers have come up with a way to spray-paint a lithium-ion battery onto pretty much any smooth surface—even a beer stein. Published in Nature’s online journal, Scientific Reports, the invention means that batteries could be added to just about any object without significantly affecting its design. The Rice team, led by graduate student…