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85% of matter in the universe is dark matter, astrophysicists say. Which might make you wonder what all this stuff is doing. I mean, some of the matter in the universe has learned to walk and talk, so why is dark matter so boring.
In case you’ve been wondering too, astrophysicists now say that some of this dark matter might form stars, sort of, which can explode, sort of. Let’s have a look.
Dark matter is one of...
2024-03-10 16:00:09 +0000 UTC
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String theory. It was supposed to be physicists’ crowning achievement, a theory that explains no less than everything, with just one simple and elegant idea: it’s all strings. You and I, matter and space, the most fundamental nature of reality, all a big tangle of strings.
It was a beautiful idea, no doubt, and thousands of physicists spent decades on it. But it didn’t quite go according to plan. String theory b...
2024-03-09 16:00:06 +0000 UTC
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What does civilization mean to you? To me the most essential part of civilization is shelter. Yes, YouTube comes a close second of course. But on top of the list, I have a safe, dry, warm place to live.
And it’s not just me. Residential heating plays a special role in peoples’ life in countries where temperatures outside frequently get a little uncomfortable. But most buildings are currently heated with gas and oil.
2024-03-08 16:00:07 +0000 UTC
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I’m convinced that it won’t be long until a computer program will reach human level intelligence and also become conscious. But I don’t think we’re quite there yet. Let's have a look at what happened this week that got everyone’s circuits overheated.
The reason I think it’s basically certain that computer programs will become conscious is that there’s nothing special going on in neurons that can...
2024-03-07 16:00:09 +0000 UTC
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What do we want? Better memory.
When do we want it? Want what?
Joking aside, I have a two Terabyte hard disk and used to think that’s a lot. Then I bought a new video camera and it’s clogged my disk in no time. And yes there’s cloud storage but you know, it’s not actually in the clouds. They still store it on some thing down on earth. And besides that, it’d take me forever to upload.
So I was thrilled...
2024-03-06 16:00:08 +0000 UTC
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Want Good Maths? Think Like a Trekkie
A team from the cloud computing company VMware discovered that the reasoning skills of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT depend on which mood the prompt suggests. In a recent preprint, they report testing ChatGPT, Bard,...
2024-03-06 16:00:07 +0000 UTC
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I got some questions the other week about an article in business insider that says it’s possible to power rockets with anti-matter and the only thing that’s preventing us from doing it is: cost. Really? The business insider writes about anti-matter. Should you buy stocks? Let’s have a look.
Antimatter isn’t science fiction, it’s stuff we know actually exist. Each particle has an anti-particle, that...
2024-03-05 16:00:10 +0000 UTC
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In the past year or so, we’ve all become used to AI generated text and images and audio and increasingly also videos. There’s been a lot of talk about how terrible this is for writers and artists and so on, but some computer scientists are warning that this AI creativity may soon collapse. Let’s have a look.
The problem is fairly easy to understand but difficult to quantify. The AIs that we currently use are deep neur...
2024-03-04 16:00:11 +0000 UTC
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Last week we had bad news for quantum computing, this week we have the most excellent good news. Thanks for living with me through the ups and downs. The news is that physicists have reached a new record for building a quantum computer out of single atoms. They’ve now made it to more than 1000 atoms and they say their method can be scaled up quickly....
2024-03-03 16:00:05 +0000 UTC
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I had a prof who used to say that black holes can’t exist because, quote “god wouldn’t separate himself from part of his universe” end quote. Now you might think that this question has been settled for good what with all the evidence we have for black holes. Also the prof has meanwhile died and yes his name was Greiner. But then again science is never really settled, is it.
And so today we 2024-03-02 16:00:10 +0000 UTC
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We’ve seen a lot of headlines in the past years saying there are things in the universe that supposedly shouldn’t exist. You may have been wondering how many things can astrophysicists possibly find that supposedly shouldn’t exist until concluding that maybe something is wrong with their ideas of what should exist in the first place?
Yes, I’ve been wondering about this, too. And in this episode I want to expla...
2024-03-01 16:00:11 +0000 UTC
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The great thing about physics is that it makes the simplest things mindbogglingly complicated. Take space. What is it? Well space is whatever is between here and there. Not that complicated. But but. Physicists say, space should have quantum properties. Space itself might be both here and there. And what the heck does that mean? Well, no one knows.
So much about the theory. But we also have experiments in physic...
2024-02-29 16:00:11 +0000 UTC
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There’s a Wave in Our Galaxy…and It Might Have Passed Through Us
A diagram illustrating the Radcliffe Wave. The white line represents its current position, with blue blobs representing star clusters. The green and purple lines indicate future positions. The...
2024-02-28 23:50:18 +0000 UTC
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A few weeks ago, I made a video on climate sensitivity, explaining why I am worried about it. There have now been a few reactions by climate scientists. I’d like to briefly comment on that, and add something which I took out of the first video.
Just a brief recap of what we’re talking about. The “climate sensitivity” is a model parameter that tells you how much the global average temperature changes
in respon...
2024-02-28 16:00:10 +0000 UTC
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The Quantum Drive, a controversial new propulsion system based on the idea of “Quantized Inertia” was launched into space for a test in November. Testing was supposed to start early February, but it didn’t quite go as planned. Let’s have a look.
On November 11, a prototype of the quantum drive was shot into space as one of 80 small satellite missions aboard a SpaceX rocket. The device was produced by the co...
2024-02-27 16:00:10 +0000 UTC
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As everyone knows, there are three different types of magnetism. So I was a bit surprised to learn of a new, third type of magnetism. Didn’t we already have three? What’s new? I had a look.
The magnets that we all know and like are what physicists call ferromagnets. Materials with these properties include most famously iron, which the name “ferromagnet” derives from, as well as nicke...
2024-02-26 16:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Do we create reality with our minds? I got this question on twitter the other day and after rolling my eyes about it for some while, I decided it’s actually a good question. You might think the answer is obviously “no”. But it’s not that simple. Let me explain.
To some extent the question whether we create reality is a matter of semantics, so w...
2024-02-25 16:00:08 +0000 UTC
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I’ve been very critical of the so-called hydrogen economy. But I’ve recently reconsidered my position because of an interesting development. A few months ago, Scientists drilled a hole in southern France to measure methane levels but instead they found hydrogen. Indeed, the...
2024-02-23 16:00:16 +0000 UTC
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Sometimes people ask me why I’m now doing science news. It’s so that you can fully appreciate the drama of scientific discovery, in which one result contradicts a previous one and the next one finds a flaw in this other one. I think the entertainment-value of science is greatly underappreciated.
And quantum computing is without doubt one of the most dramatic areas at the moment. One the one hand you have peo...
2024-02-22 16:00:09 +0000 UTC
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News from China say the Chinese have broken their own, and the global, speed record for magnetically levitating trains, which you might know under the name hyperloop. Let’s have a look.
I find news coming out of China generally somewhat difficult to interpret. In this case all we have to go by is an article that appeared in the South China Morning Post. They report that the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, CASIC...
2024-02-21 16:00:08 +0000 UTC
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Phasing out nuclear power is the dumbest thing the Germans have ever done. Each time I say this on twitter, people come and tell me that Hitler did a few things that were even dumber. I disagree. Hitler wasn’t dumb, he was evil, he knew full well what he was doing. I’m not at all sure the current German government knows what it’s doing, and that isn’t a good thing either.
The German opposition to nuclear power is especially c...
2024-02-20 16:00:08 +0000 UTC
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A group of researchers had artificial intelligence play wargames, and that gives us a good idea for how we could all die. Let’s have a look.
Last year in June, the United States’ Department of Defense released ...
2024-02-19 16:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Science has a big problem and it’s been getting rapidly worse in the past two years or so, to no small part because of recent advances in artificial intelligence. Fraudulent papers are getting published more than ever, and the fraudsters are getting increasingly aggressive. In this episode I want to give you an update on the recent developments.
2024-02-18 16:00:08 +0000 UTC
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Time Crystals sounds like something from Hogwarts, but it’s actually solid-state physics. Maybe not quite as mysterious as the name suggests, but nonetheless interesting. A team of physicists has now built the most robust time crystal ever and even figured out what these things could be good for. Let’s have a look.
A ...
2024-02-17 16:00:09 +0000 UTC
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A lot of climate targets are lip confessions. But some of those confessions get written into law, and that can create some, hmm, interesting tensions between what governments and companies say they’re doing and what the data say they’re doing. In the past weeks we have seen examples of this tension between words and reality in Japan, the EU, and the USA.
In Japan, Toyota has to answer a lot of question...
2024-02-16 16:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Artificial Intelligence is changing the world rapidly, and many of you have asked me to comment on the threat that AI poses for human civilization. Well thanks for your faith in me, but feel like I’m not the right person to ask. I think you’ll get more out of me telling you what the people think who actually work on the stuff.
And today I have very int...
2024-02-15 17:00:11 +0000 UTC
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I am fascinated by science deniers. Flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, it’s just amazing to see how badly the human brain can malfunction. Of course, it’s not just a brain problem, it’s also a social problem. In particular, the fraction of climate change deniers differs strongly by country, and it’s especially high in the United States.
2024-02-14 16:00:14 +0000 UTC
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One of the reasons I am doing these science news episodes is that sometimes there’s a news item which touches on a really deep question, but it’s so technical that no one dares talking about it. This new research is such a case. It’s an experiment that looked at the question whether aging is reversible, in glass . Yes, I’d be more interesting if it was people rather than glass, but we have to start somewhere, right, so wh...
2024-02-13 16:00:08 +0000 UTC
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Ok, I have seen a lot of weird ideas for what dark matter could be, but this one surprised even me. A team of researchers proposes that the universe might be filled with singularities and those could make up what we call dark matter. I had a look at the paper.
This new paper is about what’s called a naked singularity. They’re ca...
2024-02-12 16:00:09 +0000 UTC
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