Why does the cosmic microwave background have a strange patch that is much colder than expected? Syed Faisal ur Rahman looks at some possible explanations.

Teleportation is no longer science fiction, says a team of Chinese scientists, after teleporting a photon particle from the Earth’s surface to an orbiting satellite 870 miles (1,400 km) away. This does not mean, however, that we are now able to beam people up and down like Star Trek’s captains James Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard, or Kathryn Janeway – that is still very much in the realm of science fiction, physicists say.
Teleportation, also known as teletransportation, is the theoretical transfer of energy or matter from one point to another instantly – without traveling through the physical space between them.
For all of science’s impressive advancements, one problem has stubbornly eluded us: Why do we have consciousness? How does inert unconscious matter give rise to the light of conscious experience? Neuroscientist Donald Hoffman has been pondering this question throughout his career. His thinking has gradually led him to a surprising possibility — that consciousness itself is fundamental to reality. Donald’s theory, however, differs from that of the growing number of other scientists and philosophers now arriving at this conclusion.
“We’ve been stuck on the same problem for centuries. It’s time to take a different approach.”
The fundamental nature of reality, Donald theorizes, is comprised of an infinite network of interacting conscious agents. Uniquely, Donald offers a precise mathematical definition of a conscious agent. He believes the theory may be used to reconstruct the universe and existing scientific discoveries purely through the interaction of these units of consciousness.
During the 1930s, venerable theoretical physicist Albert Einstein returned to the field of quantum mechanics, which his theories of relativity helped to create. Hoping to develop a more complete theory of how particles behave, Einstein was instead horrified by the prospect of quantum entanglement — something he described as “spooky action at a distance.”
Despite Einstein’s misgivings, quantum entanglement has gone on to become an accepted part of quantum mechanics. And now, for the first time ever, a team of physicists from the University of Glasgow took an image of a form of quantum entanglement (aka Bell entanglement) at work. In so doing, they managed to capture the first piece of visual evidence of a phenomenon that baffled even Einstein himself.
The paper that described their findings, titled “Imaging Bell-type nonlocal behavior,” recently appeared in the journal Science Advances. The study was led by Dr. Paul-Antoine Moreau, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Glasgow, and included multiple researchers from Glasgow’s School of Physics & Astronomy.
How’s this for 2020 vision? Over the holidays, I took a series of high-res photos of my hometown on Mars. This panorama is made up of a crisp 1.8 billion pixels. It’s my most detailed view to date.
Zoom in: https://go.nasa.gov/3ap38hB
If news from Earth has got you down, maybe this update from the Red Planet will take your mind off things. NASA’s Curiosity rover mission has produced an incredible 1.8-billion-pixel image of the surface of Mars.
The image above doesn’t nearly do it justice, so be sure to watch the video below. You can also use this NASA webpage to explore the panorama in detail.
Feature image ‘Psychonaut’ courtesy of Tetramode.
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The last half century has seen humanity take its first, tentative steps into outer space. Initially, through American and Russian astronaut missions into Earth orbit and then to the Moon, though more recently robotic probes have ventured beyond our solar system entirely.