The fastest thing in the universe has come to a complete stop for a record-breaking minute. At full pelt, light would travel about 18 million kilometres in that time – that's more than 20 round trips to the moon.
"One minute is extremely, extremely long," says Thomas Krauss at the University of St Andrews, UK. "This is indeed a major milestone."
For years a staple of tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists is that the CIA had cracked a way of controlling the weather and was using it to attack people.
It is probably not surprising that they are wrong, but it turns out that the spooks are interested in doing just that.
Astronomers using a radiotelescope to perform a survey of a broad patch of the sky have spotted a set of unusual events that last for just a handful of milliseconds. The events don't repeat and aren't accompanied by anything obvious at optical X-ray wavelengths. A careful examination of their properties, however, gives reason to believe that they are likely to occur at great distances from our galaxy, suggesting they are the product of cataclysmic occurrences.
ALMOST everywhere you go on Earth, you encounter alien species that were introduced – often inadvertently – by humans. Now it seems possible that we have done the same to Mars. Despite stringent rules designed to prevent contamination, Earth microbes may have reached the Red Planet.
On June 20, 2013, at 11:24 p.m., the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or CME, a solar phenomenon that can send billions of tons of particles into space that can reach Earth one to three days later. These particles cannot travel through the atmosphere to harm humans on Earth, but they can affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground.
The dying Mediterranean Sea may have contaminated the Atlantic with a subduction zone. One day, it could help destroy the vast ocean.
Oceans come and go over hundreds of millions of years. New ones are born when continents are ripped apart, allowing hot magma to bubble up and solidify into oceanic crust. They die when continents collide and force oceanic crust back down into the mantle.
For most of its history, the idea of a multiverse was the domain of science fiction and some rare speculation from physicists. In recent years, though, the idea that our Universe may be just one among many has gained traction in two different areas.
US Navy scientists are going to rig aircraft with radiation detectors to check if a phenomenon known as dark lightning could be killing aircraft passengers.
Dark lightning is the product of the electrical activity caused by thunderstorms and produces intense bursts of omnidirectional terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) up to half a mile wide, as electrons and positrons are forced to interact by the atmospheric disturbance such storms produce.
You can manipulate an existing memory simply by suggesting new or different information, Iowa State University researchers have shown.
The key is timing and recall of that memory, said Jason Chan, an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State. “If you reactivate a memory by retrieving it, that memory becomes susceptible to changes again. And if at that time, you give people new contradictory information, that can make the original memory much harder to retrieve later,” Chan said.
Physicists have a problem, and they will be the first to admit it. The two mathematical frameworks that govern modern physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, just don't play nicely together despite decades of attempts at unification. Eric Weinstein, a consultant at a New York City hedge fund with a background in mathematics and physics, says the solution is to find beauty before seeking truth.
