Category: Ars Technica
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Snakebots, desert plants, and self-assembling space modules: the world of biomimicry
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] “Life, uh, finds a way”—Applying lessons from evolution to go to Mars Biomimicry looks to living organisms to create the future of sustainable engineering. For Ars Technica: As philosopher-mathematician…
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Meet the glueball, the missing Standard Model particle
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Glueballs are the missing frontier of the Standard Model There should be particles made entirely of gluons, but we don’t know how to find them For Ars Technica: The…
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Traces of particles from the first second after the Big Bang
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Signs of neutrinos from the dawn of time, less than a second after the Big Bang First unambiguous observation of the cosmic neutrino background From Ars Technica: The first…
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No quantum foam seen in the cosmic beer glass
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Light from distant black holes doesn’t surf on waves of quantum foam Strongest check yet on quantum gravity effects in astronomy turns up nothing For Ars Technica: Quantum gravity…
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A white dwarf murder mystery
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] What killed the white dwarfs? (Aside from the giant explosion) Merger or extra matter? Two papers come to opposite conclusions For Ars Technica: Type Ia supernovae are explosions that…
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Bathing asteroids with nuclear weapons
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] A gentle nudge with a nuke: deflecting Earth-bound asteroids From Ars Technica: In 2013, a small asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The sonic boom from the…
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Four quarks for Muster Mark!
Today, researchers with the LHCb experiment at CERN announced the confirmation of a weird object that first appeared in detectors in 2008. This object is made up of four quarks, where other particles are made of two or three quarks (or zero, in the case of electrons, neutrinos, and the like). But what sort of…
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Supersymmetry in…superconductors?
Symmetry and elegance have proven to be a very successful way to think about the physical Universe. Arguably the greatest successes in 20th century particle physics came from translating mathematical symmetries into predictions about the results of particle collisions. However, not every symmetry thus far has led to a successful theory, and one of the…
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New data offer a peek into the Universe’s first instants
Today was an exciting and stimulating day: the BICEP2 collaboration announced the first measurement of the cosmic microwave background that might tell us whether or not inflation happened. Inflation is the hypothetical rapid expansion of the Universe during its first instants, which explains a lot about why the cosmos appears the way it does. However,…
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The mystery of the lopsided Universe
On the largest scales — far bigger than any galaxy or galaxy cluster — the Universe is remarkably smooth and regular. Tiny irregularities in the early cosmos are what gave rise to all the structures we see today, including us, but there’s another irregularity covering the whole sky. The Universe appears to be ever-so-slightly lopsided,…
Bowler Hat Science 