Toggle light / dark theme

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.

Read more

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.

Quantum theory states that the quantum vacuum isn’t really empty. Quantum fluctuations of the electro-magnetic field vacuum are entangled. These fluctuations can interact locally with two space-like separated atoms and entangle them even if the two atoms never communicated with one another, or even if they never exchanged any information at all. This phenomenon is known as entanglement harvesting.

Read more

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.

Read more

Not everything about glass is clear. How its atoms are arranged and behave, in particular, is startlingly opaque.

The problem is that glass is an amorphous solid, a class of materials that lies in the mysterious realm between solid and liquid. Glassy materials also include polymers, or commonly used plastics. While it might appear to be stable and static, glass’ atoms are constantly shuffling in a frustratingly futile search for equilibrium. This shifty behavior has made the physics of glass nearly impossible for researchers to pin down.

Now a multi-institutional team including Northwestern University, North Dakota State University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has designed an algorithm with the goal of giving polymeric glasses a little more clarity. The algorithm makes it possible for researchers to create coarse-grained models to design materials with dynamic properties and predict their continually changing behaviors. Called the “energy renormalization algorithm,” it is the first to accurately predict glass’ mechanical behavior at and could result in the fast discovery of new materials, designed with optimal properties.

Read more