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85% of matter in the universe is dark matter, astrophysicists say. Which might make you wonder what all this stuff is doing. I mean, some of the matter in the universe has learned to walk and talk, so why is dark matter so boring.
In case you’ve been wondering too, astrophysicists now say that some of this dark matter migh...
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String theory. It was supposed to be physicists’ crowning achievement, a theory that explains no less than everything, with just one simple and elegant idea: it’s all strings. You and I, matter and space, the most fundamental nature of reality, all a big tangle of strings.
It was a beautiful idea, no doubt, and thou...
2024-03-09 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
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What does civilization mean to you? To me the most essential part of civilization is shelter. Yes, YouTube comes a close second of course. But on top of the list, I have a safe, dry, warm place to live.
And it’s not just me. Residential heating plays a special role in peoples’ life in countries where temperatures outside ...
2024-03-08 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
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I’m convinced that it won’t be long until a computer program will reach human level intelligence and also become conscious. But I don’t think we’re quite there yet. Let's have a look at what happened this week that got everyone’s circuits overheated.
The reason I think it’s basically certain that co...
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What do we want? Better memory.
When do we want it? Want what?
Joking aside, I have a two Terabyte hard disk and used to think that’s a lot. Then I bought a new video camera and it’s clogged my disk in no time. And yes there’s cloud storage but you know, it’s not actually in the clouds. They still store it on so...
2024-03-06 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostA team from the cloud computing company VMware discovered that the reasoning skills of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGP...
2024-03-06 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
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I got some questions the other week about an article in business insider that says it’s possible to power rockets with anti-matter and the only thing that’s preventing us from doing it is: cost. Really? The business insider writes about anti-matter. Should you buy stocks? Let’s have a look.
Antimatter isn...
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In the past year or so, we’ve all become used to AI generated text and images and audio and increasingly also videos. There’s been a lot of talk about how terrible this is for writers and artists and so on, but some computer scientists are warning that this AI creativity may soon collapse. Let’s have a look.
The problem...
2024-03-04 16:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
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Last week we had bad news for quantum computing, this week we have the most excellent good news. Thanks for living with me through the ups and downs. The news is that physicists have reached a new record for building a quantum computer out of single atoms 2024-03-03 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
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I had a prof who used to say that black holes can’t exist because, quote “god wouldn’t separate himself from part of his universe” end quote. Now you might think that this question has been settled for good what with all the evidence we have for black holes. Also the prof has meanwhile died and yes his name was Greine...
2024-03-02 16:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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We’ve seen a lot of headlines in the past years saying there are things in the universe that supposedly shouldn’t exist. You may have been wondering how many things can astrophysicists possibly find that supposedly shouldn’t exist until concluding that maybe something is wrong with their ideas of what should exist in th...
2024-03-01 16:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
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The great thing about physics is that it makes the simplest things mindbogglingly complicated. Take space. What is it? Well space is whatever is between here and there. Not that complicated. But but. Physicists say, space should have quantum properties. Space itself might be both here and there. And what the heck does t...
2024-02-29 16:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostA diagram illustrating the Radcliffe Wave. The white line represents its current position, w...
2024-02-28 23:50:18 +0000 UTC View Post
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A few weeks ago, I made a video on climate sensitivity, explaining why I am worried about it. There have now been a few reactions by climate scientists. I’d like to briefly comment on that, and add something which I took out of the first video.
Just a brief recap of what we’re talking about. The “climate sensitivity”...
2024-02-28 16:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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The Quantum Drive, a controversial new propulsion system based on the idea of “Quantized Inertia” was launched into space for a test in November. Testing was supposed to start early February, but it didn’t quite go as planned. Let’s have a look.
On November 11, a prototype of the quantum drive was shot into space a...
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As everyone knows, there are three different types of magnetism. So I was a bit surprised to learn of a new, third type of magnetism. Didn’t we already have three? What’s new? I had a look.
The magnets that we all know and like are what physicists call ferromagnets. Materials with these properti...
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Do we create reality with our minds? I got this question on twitter the other day and after rolling my eyes about it for some while, I decided it’s actually a good question. You might think the answer is obviously “no”. But it’s not that simple. Let me...
2024-02-25 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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I got quite a few questions about a paper that supposedly revolutionizes our ...
2024-02-24 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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I’ve been very critical of the so-called hydrogen economy. But I’ve recently reconsidered my position because of an interesting development. A few months ago, Scientists drilled ...
2024-02-23 16:00:16 +0000 UTC View Post
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Sometimes people ask me why I’m now doing science news. It’s so that you can fully appreciate the drama of scientific discovery, in which one result contradicts a previous one and the next one finds a flaw in this other one. I think the entertainment-value of science is greatly underappreciated.
And quantum computin...
2024-02-22 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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News from China say the Chinese have broken their own, and the global, speed record for magnetically levitating trains, which you might know under the name hyperloop. Let’s have a look.
I find news coming out of China generally somewhat difficult to interpret. In this case all we have to go by is an article that appeared in the So...
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Phasing out nuclear power is the dumbest thing the Germans have ever done. Each time I say this on twitter, people come and tell me that Hitler did a few things that were even dumber. I disagree. Hitler wasn’t dumb, he was evil, he knew full well what he was doing. I’m not at all sure the current German government knows what it’s doing, a...
2024-02-20 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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A group of researchers had artificial intelligence play wargames, and that gives us a good idea for how we could all die. Let’s have a look.
2024-02-19 16:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Science has a big problem and it’s been getting rapidly worse in the past two years or so, to no small part because of recent advances in artificial intelligence. Fraudulent papers are getting published more than ever, and the fraudsters are getting increasingly aggressive. In this episode I want to give you an update on the rece...
2024-02-18 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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Time Crystals sounds like something from Hogwarts, but it’s actually solid-state physics. Maybe not quite as mysterious as the name suggests, but nonetheless interesting. A team of physicists has now built the most robust time cryst...
2024-02-17 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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A lot of climate targets are lip confessions. But some of those confessions get written into law, and that can create some, hmm, interesting tensions between what governments and companies say they’re doing and what the data say they’re doing. In the past weeks we have seen examples of this tension between words and...
2024-02-16 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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Artificial Intelligence is changing the world rapidly, and many of you have asked me to comment on the threat that AI poses for human civilization. Well thanks for your faith in me, but feel like I’m not the right person to ask. I think you’ll get more out of me telling you what the people think who actually work on the stuff.<...
2024-02-15 17:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
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I am fascinated by science deniers. Flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, it’s just amazing to see how badly the human brain can malfunction. Of course, it’s not just a brain problem, it’s also a social problem. In particular, the fraction of climate change deniers differs strongly by country, and it’s ...
2024-02-14 16:00:14 +0000 UTC View Post
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One of the reasons I am doing these science news episodes is that sometimes there’s a news item which touches on a really deep question, but it’s so technical that no one dares talking about it. This new research is such a case. It’s an experiment that looked at the question whether aging is reversible, in glass . Yes, I’d ...
2024-02-13 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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Ok, I have seen a lot of weird ideas for what dark matter could be, but this one surprised even me. A team of researchers proposes that the universe might be filled with singularities and those could make up what we call dark matter. I had a look a...
2024-02-12 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
