Tiny sensors with tinier legs, stamped out of silicon wafers, could one day soon help fix your cellphone battery or study your brain.
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The Food and Drug Administration is forcing certain sleep drugs to carry a deadly serious warning about the rare, frightening side effects they can cause. The side effects, which have reportedly caused serious injuries and even deaths, include sleepwalking and other intricate behaviors done while a person is sleeping or not fully awake, like driving and cooking.
The new black box warning—the strictest label used by the FDA to denote potentially life-threatening side effects—will apply to three drugs commonly used for insomnia and sold under various brand names. They are eszopiclone (Lunesta), zaleplon (Sonata), and zolpidem (Ambien, among other names). In addition to the warning, people will also be told to stop or avoid using these drugs if they’ve ever experienced these symptoms.
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Researchers in the U.K. have developed a way of storing digital data inside tiny structures contained in glass.
The storage technology is so stable and safe that it can survive for billions of years, scientists at the University of Southampton said this week.
That’s a lot longer than your average computer hard drive.
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Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size.
10/18/18
Our best model of particle physics explains only about 5 percent of the universe.
09/25/18
Particle physicists and astrophysicists employ a variety of tools to avoid erroneous results.
Ever since the 1989 debacle, cold fusion has been a byword for “junk science”—and cold fusion research has been anathema, tantamount to scientific suicide. Still, some quiet pioneers have continued the research, albeit under a changed name: LENR, or “low-energy nuclear reactions.” The jury’s still out on whether their methods will prove successful, but the race for inexhaustible “cold” fusion is definitely heating up.
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Circa 2016
Entanglement is an extremely strong correlation that can exist between quantum systems. These correlations are so strong that two or more entangled particles have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated.
It has been shown that even if two uncorrelated quantum systems that don’t know anything about each other can still become entangled in a quantum vacuum without being limited by the speed of light.
Glaciers are set to disappear completely from almost half of World Heritage sites if business-as-usual emissions continue, according to the first-ever global study of World Heritage glaciers.
The sites are home to some of the world’s most iconic glaciers, such as the Grosser Aletschgletscher in the Swiss Alps, Khumbu Glacier in the Himalayas and Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae.
The study in the AGU journal Earth’s Future and co-authored by scientists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) combines data from a global glacier inventory, a review of existing literature and sophisticated computer modeling to analyze the current state of World Heritage glaciers, their recent evolution, and their projected mass change over the 21st century.
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