The Sci Tech World

Black holes are the source of a major quandary when it comes to our understanding of physics; either they can destroy information, which contradicts what we know about quantum mechanics, or they seemingly disregard Einstein’s theory of relativity. However, it’s now thought by some that the many worlds interpretation might help explain the situation. It suggests that each one of the multiple possible outcomes of a quantum event splinters off into its own discrete world. Now, a team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology led by Sean Carroll has suggested that this interpretation can explain away inconsistencies pertaining to black holes. They say that general relativity is upheld within each single possible world, while information is preserved across the entire global wave function, if not among individual branches. MANY WORLDS Aidan Chatwin-Davies, a member of Carroll’s team, told Futurism that other scientists have already suggested applying the many worlds theory, a...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which is currently on its way to grab a chunk of an asteroid, has returned a stunning image of Earth and the Moon in the process. The spacecraft snapped the image on October 2, 2017, just after it made a flyby of Earth, although the image has only just been released by NASA. At this time the Moon was about 390,000 kilometers (240,000 miles) from Earth. OSIRIS-REx took this image from a distance of more than 5 million kilometers (3 million miles) from Earth, or more than 13 times the Earth-Moon distance. It was taken by combining three images from different color wavelengths. The Moon was brightened to make it more visible. The spacecraft was launched on September 8, 2016, but in order to reach its target, it then orbited the Sun for a year before flying past Earth to get a speed boost from our planet’s gravity. It made its closest approach to our planet – an altitude of 17,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) – on September 22, 2017, and took this image 10 days l...

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope discovered an Earth-like planet circling a nearby star within the Goldilocks zone of our galaxy. Kepler-186f is around 500 light-years from Earth in the Cygnus constellation. The habitable zone, also identified as the Goldilocks zone, is the area around a star within which planetary-mass objects with enough atmospheric pressure can sustain liquid water at their surfaces. While it has been projected that there are at least 40 billion Earth-sized planets circling in our Milky Way Galaxy, this specific finding is labelled the first Earth-sized planet to be discovered in the habitable zone of another star. What does this mean? In addition to Kepler-186f, there are 4 other planets that circle a nearby star within the Kepler-186f system. What this means is that if the neighbouring star to this planet is just like our Sun, then the likelihood of life on this planet exponentially increases. “We know of only one planet where life survives – Earth. When we hunt for ...

Planet Earth is now doomed to face a very terrifying encounter with a massive rogue ‘death star’, scientists have warned. The two astronomers from the University of Madrid have just published a paper which ‘confirms’ fears that a star called Gliese 710 will come unnervingly close to our solar system. Although this will not be a head-on collision, the prodigal sun will scorch through the Oort cloud – a ring made up of trillions of icy objects that are thought to surround our solar system. This could send asteroids and comets speeding towards Earth and other planets. The star will come within rougly 13,366 AU (a unit which measures the distance between Earth and the Sun) of our star. ‘It may trigger a major comet shower that will affect the inner solar system,’ the astronomers warned. ‘Gliese 710 is headed straight for the solar system,’ they added. We’ve got about 1.35 million years to prepare for the arrival of this ‘death star’, but no way of diverting it. The new study does not think...

Richard Feynman was a curious character. He advertised as much in the subtitle of his autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character. Everybody knew that, in many respects, Feynman was an oddball. But he was curious in every other sense of the word as well. His curiosity about nature, about how the world works, led to a Nobel Prize in physics and a legendary reputation, both among physicists and the public at large. Feynman was born 100 years ago May 11. It’s an anniversary inspiring much celebration in the physics world. Feynman was one of the last great physicist celebrities, universally acknowledged as a genius who stood out even from other geniuses. In 1997 I interviewed Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, a Cornell University physicist who worked with Feynman during World War II on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos (and later on the Cornell faculty). “Normal” geniuses, Bethe said, did things much better than other people but you could figure out ho...

Feeding knowledge directly into your brain, just like in sci-fi classic The Matrix, could soon take as much effort as falling asleep, scientists believe. Researchers claim to have developed a simulator which can feed information directly into a person’s brain and teach them new skills in a shorter amount of time, comparing it to “life imitating art”. They believe it could be the first steps in developing advanced software that will make Matrix-style instant learning a reality. In the neo-noir sci-fi classic, protagonist Neo is able to learn kung fu in seconds after the martial art is ‘uploaded’ straight to his brain. Researchers from HRL Laboratories, based in California, say they have found a way to amplify learning, only on a much smaller scale than seen in the Hollywood film. They studied the electric signals in the brain of a trained pilot and then fed the data into novice subjects as they learned to pilot an aeroplane in a realistic flight simulator. The study, published in the jo...

Scientists say they’ve found significant deposits of water ice hiding extremely close to the surface of Mars. This is a type of discovery that could be hugely beneficial for future Mars exploration missions. The findings, published in the journal Science, were led by Colin Dundas from the US Geological Survey in Arizona. The discovery was made using the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They found eight mid-latitude locations where escarpments (or scarps), steep banks or cliffs that have been eroded away, had exposed huge cross-sections of ice. In some of the regions, the ice was an astonishing 100 meters (330 feet) thick, and it starts just 1 or 2 meters (3.3 to 6.6 feet) below the surface. What's more, the ice appears to be layered, not too dissimilar to sedimentary layers on Earth. This means the sheets could show us different geological periods in the history of Mars. “This gives us a much more detailed window int...