The cosmic explosion happened 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was fairly young, and could shed light on the evolution of stars and galaxies.
Microbial life may have resided within the first four kilometers of Mars’s porous crust.
Four billion years ago, the solar system was still young. Almost fully formed, its planets were starting to experience asteroid strikes a little less frequently. Our own planet could have become habitable as long as 3.9 billion years ago, but its primitive biosphere was much different than it is today. Life had not yet invented photosynthesis, which some 500 million years later would become its main source of energy. The primordial microbes — the common ancestors to all current life forms on Earth — in our planet’s oceans, therefore, had to survive on another source of energy.
Some of the oldest life forms in our biosphere were microorganisms known as “hydrogenotrophic methanogens” that particularly benefited from the atmospheric composition of the time. Feeding on the CO2 (carbon dioxide) and H2 (dihydrogen) that abounded in the atmosphere (with H2 representing between 0.01 and 0.1% of the atmospheric composition, compared to the current approximate of 0.00005%), they harnessed enough energy to colonize the surface of our planet’s oceans.
Continue reading “Mars shows how even the simplest life forms can destroy their own planet” »
The scientists said their spacetime simulation “agrees very well with theory.”
A team of physicists used a “quantum field simulator” to simulate a tiny expanding universe made out of ultracold atoms, a report from VICE
Simulating spacetime.
The observation of the onset of turbulence in a gas of bosons allows researchers to explore how turbulence comes to life.
Despite over a century of trying, physicists have yet to develop a complete theory of turbulence—the complex, chaotic motion of a fluid. Now Maciej Gałka of the University of Cambridge and colleagues have taken a step in that direction by witnessing the onset of turbulence in a quantum gas and observing its evolution over roughly 100 ms [1]. The finding could help scientists answer open questions in turbulence, which is observed in systems ranging from ocean waves to star interiors.
Elon Musk doesn’t follow the same standards that most entrepreneurs do. He’s different, he likes to be different!
And when you’re different, and you’re not afraid to be, it’s okay to test a cigar (or should I say ‘joint’?) of tobacco mixed with marijuana, on Joe Rogan’s famous podcast. But if you look closely, Elon was just nice (polite) and followed Rogan’s elaborate script. Before trying it, Musk even asked him if it was legal.
Then all those facial expressions of Musk, which photojournalists love to catch, go viral as if he’s there promoting some soft drug or passing abroad that his office at Tesla (or SpaceX) is enveloped in a large cloud of smoke.
Quite the opposite. The expressions themselves spoke for themselves, as if to say, “This is nothing special, Joe. Why do you waste my time with these scenes”? Musk even claimed that weed is not good for productivity at all, but it has nothing against (as I do, by the way).
Continue reading “From ‘Chief Twit’ to ‘Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator’” »
An international research team led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has measured the size of a star dating back 2 billion years after the Big Bang, or more than 11 billion years ago. Detailed images show the exploding star cooling and could help scientists learn more about the stars and galaxies present in the early universe. The paper is published in Nature.
“This is the first detailed look at a supernova at a much earlier epoch of the universe’s evolution,” said Patrick Kelly, a lead author of the paper and an associate professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy. “It’s very exciting because we can learn in detail about an individual star when the universe was less than a fifth of its current age, and begin to understand if the stars that existed many billions of years ago are different from the ones nearby.”
The red supergiant in question was about 500 times larger than the sun, and it’s located at redshift three, which is about 60 times farther away than any other supernova observed in this detail.
Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is one of the pillars of the Standard Model of particle physics. It describes the strong interaction – one of the four fundamental forces of nature. This force holds quarks and gluons – collectively known as partons – together in hadrons such as the proton, and protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei. Two hallmarks of QCD are chiral symmetry breaking and asymptotic freedom. Chiral symmetry breaking explains how quarks generate the masses of hadrons and therefore the vast majority of visible mass in the universe. Asymptotic freedom states that the strong force between quarks and gluons decreases with increasing energy. The discovery of these two QCD effects garnered two Nobel prizes in physics, in 2008 and 2004, respectively.
High-energy collisions of lead nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) explore QCD under the most extreme conditions on Earth. These heavy-ion collisions recreate the quark–gluon plasma (QGP): the hottest and densest fluid ever studied in the laboratory. In contrast to normal nuclear matter, the QGP is a state where quarks and gluons are not confined inside hadrons. It is speculated that the universe was in a QGP state around one millionth of a second after the Big Bang.
The ALICE experiment was designed to study the QGP at LHC energies. It was operated during LHC Runs 1 and 2, and has carried out a broad range of measurements to characterise the QGP and to study several other aspects of the strong interaction. In a recent review, highlights of which are described below, the ALICE collaboration takes stock of its first decade of QCD studies at the LHC. The results from these studies include a suite of observables that reveal a complex evolution of the near-perfect QGP liquid that emerges in high-temperature QCD. ALICE measurements also demonstrate that charm quarks equilibrate extremely quickly within this liquid, and are able to regenerate QGP-melted “charmonium” particle states. ALICE has extensively mapped the QGP opaqueness with high-energy probes, and has directly observed the QCD dead-cone effect in proton–proton collisions. Surprising QGP-like signatures have also been observed in rare proton–proton and proton–lead collisions.
The last chimp/human common ancestor died out between five and seven million years ago, giving way to the first pre-humans. But the lineage shared by humans and great apes split several hundred thousand years earlier than we thought, according to new findings. In other words, we split off from our furry friends and began our separate evolution into humans earlier than scientists previously argued.
Building A More Secure World — Dr. James Revill, Ph.D. — Head of Weapons of Mass Destruction & Space Security Programs, UNIDIR, UN Institute for Disarmament Research United Nations.
Dr. James Revill, Ph.D. (https://unidir.org/staff/james-revill) is the Head of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and Space Security Program, at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).
This time I come to talk about a new concept in this Age of Artificial Intelligence and the already insipid world of Social Networks. Initially, quite a few years ago, I named it “Counterpart” (long before the TV series “Counterpart” and “Black Mirror”, or even the movie “Transcendence”).
It was the essence of the ETER9 Project that was taking shape in my head.
Over the years and also with the evolution of technologies — and of the human being himself —, the concept “Counterpart” has been getting better and, with each passing day, it makes more sense!
Imagine a purely digital receptacle with the basics inside, like that Intermediate Software (BIOS(1)) that computers have between the Hardware and the Operating System. That receptacle waits for you. One way or another, it waits patiently for you, as if waiting for a Soul to come alive in the ether of digital existence.
