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Trump shouldn’t be ridiculed for looking to the heavens, but a more urgent threat looms.
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For some reason, Google is rebranding Google Drive storage plans under the name Google One. Along with the rebranding, Google is also improving its pricing in ways that give customers more options and more storage at lower prices. It marks the service’s first price cut in four years.
Google One plans start at the same place as Google Drive plans — $1.99 per month for 100GB of additional storage — but the situation improves after that. Google is introducing a new $2.99-per-month tier, which includes 200GB of storage, and it’s upgrading the $9.99-per-month tier to include 2TB of storage instead of 1TB.
We signed up for a 2TB storage option to try out Google One. The process is simple, you just head into Google Drive and click on Storage, then Upgrade Storage, to bring up all the possible upgrades.
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AI can peer pressure you, too
Posted in robotics/AI
Forget the Higgs: theorists have uncovered a missing link that explains dark matter, what happened in the big bang and more. Now they’re racing to find it.
By Michael Brooks
911? It’s an emergency. The most important particle in the universe is missing. Florian Goertz knows this isn’t a case for the police, but he is still waiting impatiently for a response. This 911 isn’t a phone number, but a building on the northern edge of the world’s biggest particle accelerator.
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A trio of physicists with Columbia University is making waves with a new theory about phonons—they suggest they might have negative mass, and because of that, have negative gravity. Angelo Esposito, Rafael Krichevsky and Alberto Nicolis have written a paper to support their theory, including the math, and have uploaded it to the xrXiv preprint server.
Most theories depict sound waves as more of a collective event than as physical things. They are seen as the movement of molecules bumping against each other like balls on a pool table—the energy of one ball knocking the next, and so on—any motion in one direction is offset by motion in the opposite direction. In such a model, sound has no mass, and thus cannot be impacted by gravity. But there may be more to the story. In their paper, the researchers suggest that the current theory does not fully explain everything that has been observed.
In recent years, physicists have come up with a word to describe the behavior of sound waves at a very small scale—the phonon. It describes the way sound vibrations cause complicated interactions with molecules, which allows the sound to propagate. The term has been useful because it allows for applying principles to sound that have previously been applied to actual particles. But no one has suggested that they actually are particles, which means they should not have mass. In this new effort, the researchers suggest the phonon could have negative mass, and because of that, could also have negative gravity.
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By Chelsea Whyte
Swirling patterns in the sky may be signs of black holes that survived the destruction of a universe before the big bang.
“What we claim we’re seeing is the final remnant after a black hole has evaporated away in the previous aeon,” says Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford.
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