Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists believe the environment immediately surrounding a black hole is tumultuous, featuring hot magnetized gas that spirals in a disk at tremendous speeds and temperatures. Astronomical observations show that within such a disk, mysterious flares occur up to several times a day, temporarily brightening and then fading away.

Now a team led by Caltech scientists has used telescope data and an artificial intelligence (AI) computer-vision technique to recover the first three-dimensional video showing what such flares could look like around SagittariusA* (Sgr A• the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy.

The 3D flare structure features two bright, compact features located about 75 million kilometers (or half the distance between Earth and the sun) from the center of the black hole. It is based on data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile over a period of 100 minutes directly after an eruption seen in Xray data on April 11, 2017.

From the article by Robin Hanson, a professor of economics who also holds degrees in physics and computer science.

So this remains my worry: our rapid rates of change in unconditional choices of cultural norms are not mostly driven by reason, but instead by a cultural evolution process that has…

I’ve been reading, thinking, and talking, trying to get clearer on what exactly are the culture problems I’m worried about, and how best to describe them. I seek descriptions not only easy for an outsider public to understand, but also for prestigious insider specialists to embrace.

Continue reading “I Fear Maladaptive Culture” »

In the scientific literature, a citation acts as a mechanism to signal prior knowledge, enhance credibility, and protect against plagiarism. But it also gives credit to the individual or team who established or discovered the knowledge in question, and citations have thus emerged as a metric to measure the impact of a work or researcher.

AD — Go to https://ground.news/drbecky to stay fully informed with the latest Space and Science news. Subscribe through my link to get 40% off the Vantage plan for unlimited access this month only. | I often get asked how do we know dark matter exists? Which is why I’ve made a video on all the observational evidence we have before (linked below)! But occasionally I’ll get asked how do we know how much dark matter there is, which is a really fun question. There’s many different ways we can calculate this, including the ratio between normal (baryonic) and dark matter, but in this video I just wanted to highlight three different ways astrophysicists calculate this.

Here’s my previous video on all the evidence we have for dark matter — • All the evidence we have for dark mat…
My previous video on whether dark matter could be made of black holes — • Is dark matter made of black holes?
My previous video on whether black holes contain dark matter — • Do black holes contain dark matter?
My previous video on why galaxies merge if the universe is expanding — • If the Universe is expanding, then wh…

Continue reading “How do we know how much dark matter there is in the Universe?” »

A new article explores the physics behind the popular party trick of infinite mirrors, explaining why it may not actually create infinite reflections. While it may seem like a never-ending loop, the reality is that the reflections eventually become too faint to see. This phenomenon is a result of the way light behaves and can be explained by the laws of physics.

With pulses of sound through tiny speakers, Cornell physics researchers have clarified the basic nature of a new superconductor.

Does free will exist? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice sit down with astrophysicist Charles Liu sit down to discuss the existence of free will and whether physics allows for choice in our lives.

We explore cause and effect: how does uncertainty and chaos in the universe factor into free will? How important is the illusion of free will to society? What does a society that acknowledges a lack of free will look like?

Continue reading “Two Astrophysicists Debate Free Will” »

An international research team at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University has successfully created five new isotopes, bringing the stars closer to Earth.

The isotopes — known as thulium-182, thulium-183, ytterbium-186, ytterbium-187, and lutetium-190 — were reported Feb. 15 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

These represent the first batch of new isotopes made at FRIB, a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, supporting the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. The new isotopes show that FRIB is nearing the creation of nuclear specimens that currently only exist when ultradense celestial bodies known as neutron stars crash into each other.

By nudging a thorium-229 nucleus into a higher energy state, physicists have made it possible to develop a nuclear clock that could probe the most fundamental forces in physics. However, there is still a long way to go.