Adam Frank: Looking back 100, 1000 or 10,000 years, it became clear to me that time in cosmology (be it of the scientific or mytho-religious variety) has always been tightly braided with the human experience of time.
Click-click-click: This is what you hear when having a conversation with Stephen Hawking. No voice, no other sounds, no facial expressions. For those who know him, Hawking may be able to communicate through his eyes; but for the rest of us, his sole means of communicating is through infrared connection to his computer. January 8…
Anyone who bet against Einstein better get out their wallet. That’s because those supposedly faster-than-light particles that shook up the world of physics last September are now looking a lot slower. A second experiment deep in an Italian mountain timed these subatomic particles, called neutrinos, traveling at precisely the speed of light and no faster,…
Quantum physics deals with the realm of the very small, and most of us never expect to see the weird world it describes. But could we? Recently, scientist Geraldo Barbosa of Northwestern University designed an experiment to answer that question. The quantum effect Barbosa is hoping to see is called quantum entanglement, in which two…
A new survey finds that a majority of Americans believe that weather in the United States is getting worse, and they are linking it to global warming.
In a laboratory in Scotland, a revolutionary kind of laser is taking shape – the first one to be made out of an artificial black hole. Once complete, the device could help confirm mounting evidence that real black holes, despite their name, emit light. A black-hole laser could also find practical uses in devices that…
A team of researchers at Michigan State University has documented the step-by-step process in which organisms evolve new functions. The results, published in the journal Nature, are revealed through an in-depth, genomics-based analysis that decodes how E. coli bacteria figured out how to supplement a traditional diet of glucose with an extra course of citrate….