It’s an important step for the firm.
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Far from being empty, the vacuum of space could be brimming with mysterious virtual particles. We now have a machine powerful enough to tear it apart and see.
By Jon Cartwright
IMAGINE a place far from here, deep in the emptiness of space. This point is light years from Earth, vastly distant from any nebula, star or lonely atom. We have many words for what you would find in such a place: a void, a vacuum, a lacuna. In fact, this nothingness is a sea of activity.
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Astronomers have announced that they have gathered new data on the black hole that lies at the center of our galaxy. The new information was gleaned when the scientists added the ALMA telescope into the array of telescopes being used to study the black hole. The discovery has found that the emissions from the supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A (Sgr A), comes from a smaller region than previously believed.
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For nearly 200 years, Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa has inspired wonder partly because the event it depicts, a towering freak wave, has defied scientific explanation.
Now, a team at Oxford and Edinburgh universities claim to have laid the mystery to rest by successfully creating one for themselves — and it looks remarkably similar.
The achievement is being hailed as a significant breakthrough because, so far, meteorologists and sailors have had no means of predicting the likelihood of violent waves that are unexpectedly large compared to their surroundings.
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We’ve all seen the stark headlines: “Being Rich and Successful Is in Your DNA” (Guardian, July 12); “A New Genetic Test Could Help Determine Children’s Success” (Newsweek, July 10); “Our Fortunetelling Genes” make us (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16); and so on.
The problem is, many of these headlines are not discussing real genes at all, but a crude statistical model of them, involving dozens of unlikely assumptions. Now, slowly but surely, that whole conceptual model of the gene is being challenged.
We have reached peak gene, and passed it.
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