Sabine

IPCC Climate Mitigaton Plans Unrealistic and Dangerous, New Study Says

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

Some people have called me a doomer.  Others call me a pessimist.  Personally, I think I’m a realist.  If I look at the plans that most nations have made to limit their contribution to climate change, I think it just isn’t going to happen. The people making these plans are either ill-informed, delusional, or lyin...

Huge New Particle Collider at CERN: First Details & More False Claims

[This is a transcript.]

We have seen a few new headlines this week about the plans of particle physicists to build a huge new collider at CERN in Geneva. I’ve had a look.

Particle physicists have called their new dream machine the “future circular collider”, FCC for short. The FCC is supposed to be a ring collider like the Large Hadron Collider, which is currently t...

First Nuclear Plasma Control with Digital Twin

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

Nuclear fusion is a great idea, in principle. In principle, it could solve the energy worries of the world beautifully. The problem is that whenever we’ve tried, getting nuclear fusion to work takes up more energy than it creates. But a team from Japan and the United States just got us a bit closer to our dream of clean energy. T...

New battery takes less than 5 minutes to fully charge

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

Electric vehicles are great, but let’s be honest, it’s more convenient to fill up a fuel tank with gasoline than sit around and wait until the battery is full. It takes so long that sometimes you even have to talk to other people at the charging place, uh. Well, this new battery from researchers at Cornell might solve the probl...

String theory nonsense makes comeback

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

I got a lot of questions last week about an article in Quanta Magazine about Dark Dimensions. And for a change this is a case where I think I’m actually the right person to ask. What’s this ...

No Evidence that Social Media Affects Mental Health, Zuckerberg Says

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

Last week, the US senate had a hearing  on the dangers of social media in preparation of a legislation to improve child safety online. In this hearing, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg  claimed that it has not been scientifically proved that social media causes mental health problems in adolescents.

This upset a lot of peop...

Supposed New Law of Nature Now Looks Like Statistical Error

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

This is a rare case in which I talk about some of my own work. It’s about the biggest current controversy in astrophysics, does dark matter exist or do we instead need to change the law of gravity.

If you’ve followed me for some while, then you’ll ...

AI experts make predictions for 2040. I was a little surprised.

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

We’ve seen a lot of headlines in the past year about how dangerous AI is  and how overblown these fears are . I’ve found it hard to make sense of this discussion. If only someone could systematically interview experts and figure out what they’re worried about. Well, 2024-02-04 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post

The discovery of X-rays, and what we can learn from it

[This is a transcript of the video.]

This is the amazing story of the discovery of X-rays, the trouble that followed, and what we can learn from it.

It’s November and the year is 1885. Wilhem Conrad Röntgen is in his laboratory in Wuerzburg, Germany. For the past weeks he’s been studying the new cathode ray tubes from his colleague Phillip Lenard.

Cathode ra...

Typing makes dumb, new study says. Or does it?

 [This is a transcript with links to references.]

Do you still write by hand? Anything besides shopping lists? A new study looked at what happens in our brain when we write by hand or type on the keyboard, and it makes a really strong case for handwriting. ...

A Tsunami Devastated Stone-age Britain. Could it happen again?

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

A new study by a group of British geologists suggests that a huge tsunami devastated the populations of Stone Age Britain, about 8200 years ago. Cool! Disaster! Extinction! Could it happen again? Let’...

Shooting at the Sky, Mirrors in Space, & Science on the Blockchain

Shooting Down Space Debris

Ground-based nuclear fusion laser observatory tracks and fires at distant space debris targets. (Image Credit: Australian EOS)....

First Experimental Test of Process that Might Have Created Universe

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

One of the most disturbing ideas in physics, or maybe *the most disturbing idea, is that space can fall apart. That’s because it could be what’s called “false” vacuum. A false vacuum can remain in this innocent reliable looking form for billions of years, but eventually a quantum fluctuation could be enough to ca...

AI makes stunning progress in logical reasoning

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

Google has unveiled a new artificially intelligent system, AlphaGeometry, that can solve problems of mathematical geometry. It’s the first computer program to surpass the average performance of participants at the International Mathematical Olympiad. That might sound like an incremental improvement, just one more thing that AI i...

Brian Cox debunked the Big Bang! Wait what?

[This is a transcript of the video.]

What happened before the Big Bang? I got this question on twitter and thought, well, the answer is that we don’t know. Now, I’m quite fond of short videos, but that’s a little too short even for my taste. 2024-01-29 16:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post

Dark Matter is Not "Bunk Science" -- But it has problems

[This is a transcript.]

Physicists say that 80 percent of the mass in the universe is dark matter, and not only this, dark matter is supposedly all around us, we just can’t see it. Sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it. Indeed, every time I mention dark matter, I get flooded with comments about how silly the idea is. “2024-01-28 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post

I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do.

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

YouTube has removed the dislike counter, but the numbers are still available backstage. And I can tell you that my most disliked videos, by far, are those on climate change. Doesn’t matter if it’s good news or bad news, some people it seems reflexively dislike anything about the topic. Every time.

And to be honest, I ca...

Does Everything Make Quantum Jumps? Clever New Experiment Could Find Out

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

I got a lot of questions this week about an article which said that physicists have designed “a Way to Detect Quantum Behaviour in Large Objects, Like Us”. Quantum Behaviour like what?...

How do we know that climate change is caused by humans?

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

How do we know that climate change is caused by humans? I got this question on twitter and I thought, c’mon, Google can answer that.

Well, the first hit I got on Google is a quote from a NASA website “It is undeniable ...

Fearless Icelanders to Drill Into Magma Chamber

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

I don’t like places where hot stuff bubbles out of the ground, but Icelanders have no such issues. They’re now almost ready to start a new experiment that will drill right into a magma chamber. How do they know that this will not accidentally create a volcano? Let’s have a look.

Iceland is an island in the Northern A...

Extreme Weather Becomes Worse Faster Than Predicted

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

Floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, storm surges. Extreme weather events receive a lot of media coverage. In recent years, these events have frequently been attributed to climate change. This “extreme event attribution” how it’s called is a way to quantify how climate change supposedly increased the likelihood of a spe...

Another Famous Quantum Experiment Was Just Debunked

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

The quantum Cheshire Cat is a famous experiment that’s attracted a lot of attention in the past decade. In this experiment, a particle is supposedly separated from one of its properties, for example its spin or polarization. It’s called the Cheshire cat because that particle is kind of like the cat and its disembodied property ...

Crack Down On “New Climate Denial,” Nonprofit tells YouTube

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

The Center for Countering Digital Hate put out a new report a few days ago, in which they warn that climate misinformation continuous to flourish on YouTube. They want YouTube to take more action. Let’s have a look

The Center for ...

You Probably Don't Know Why You Have Mass

Have you ever wondered where all that mass around you comes from? No, it’s not the sugar industry, it comes from the pion condensate. Let me explain.

The Higgs boson is one of the elementary particles of nature. Physicists collect all those particles in what’s somewhat unimaginatively called the standard model. It’s like the collector’s box of particle physics, basically. That the...

Astrophysicists find Big Ring of Galaxies that Should Not Exist

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

A group of astrophysicists have found another megastructure in the universe. They’ve called it the “Big Ring” and it’s a whopping 1 point 3 billion light-years in diameter. The thing isn’t just huge, it’s also a huge problem for our understanding of how the universe works. Because it shouldn’t exist. I’m somewhat af...

Names That Fly to Jupiter, British Uranium, and Very Bright Lights

Send Your Name in a Bottle to Jupiter

Remember those companies that would charge you $19.99 to name a star after someone, but then nobody would actually use the name? H...

Sugar Alcohols Ruined My Health: Learn from My Mistakes

[This is a transcript.]

This is a video about digestive problems. It’s not what I normally talk about, and so I’ve hesitated to make this video. But then I thought. If it helps even one single person to avoid some of the pain and sleepless nights I’ve gone through, it’ll have been worth it. So here we go.

If you regularly suffer from abdominal pain, cramps, bloati...

New Cancer Treatment with Particle Beam Flashes goes to trial

[This is a transcript of the video.]

We have talked a lot about particle accelerators that look for new physics. But sometimes you can teach new tricks to old physics. A great example of this is flash proton therapy for cancer treatment, that’s just out of the laboratory and now being tested on patients in the first trials. Let’s have a look.  

First things first...

This New Nuclear Battery Could Soon Go On The Market

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

A Chinese company has announced they’re planning to mass-produce tiny nuclear batteries that can last up to 50 years, possibly beating both a British and an American company who have tried to put those on the market for several years. What does that mean? Will we soon all power our phones with nuclear power? Let’s have a look.<...

Our Universe Will Probably Not Rip Apart, Phew!

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

The Dark Energy Survey has surveyed dark energy and found that our universe is unlikely to rip into pieces. I think that’s good news. Let’s have a look.

Dark Energy is the name that astrophysicists have given to a hypothetical ingredient of the universe that makes the expansion of the universe faster. So it’s not that...