News
A Big Bang Inside a Dying Star Could Stop Black Holes from Ever Forming
1+ hour, 44+ min ago (377+ words) An expanding mini universe could counterbalance the collapsing matter of a star, thereby creating a stable gravastar. The idea sounds like science fiction. The mathematics, published this week in Physical Review D, says otherwise. Physicists have never been entirely comfortable…...
Almost Everyone Drifts Counterclockwise When They Walk, and Nobody Knows Why
1+ day, 3+ hour ago (24+ words) Thirty-two times out of thirty-three, the crowd turned the same way. Left. Always left, looping counterclockwise around the enclosure like water circling...
A Pinch of Scandium Keeps Carbon Nanotube Forests Growing Where Iron Alone Burns Out
1+ day, 3+ hour ago (27+ words) Inside a quartz tube barely wider than a wrist, the temperature climbs past 800 degrees C and a forest begins to rise. Not trees, but carbon nanotubes,...
Headset Lets Beginners Read an Ultrasound Like Veterans
1+ day, 3+ hour ago (424+ words) MIT researchers have developed a new approach to ultrasound imaging that allows the user to visualize a 3 D augmented-reality image of the object being scanned. Using a virtual-reality headset, they can see a precise 3 D digital representation of what the…...
Koreans Fold Processing, Memory, and Light Into a Single Soft Transistor
3+ day, 4+ hour ago (211+ words) Press a fingertip to a thin, bendy patch of plastic and, if you press hard enough, a stripe of light answers back. Not from a screen tucked underneath....
Switching Off Small Patches of the Waking Brain Delivers the Benefits of Sleep
3+ day, 4+ hour ago (89+ words) The mouse is wide awake. It is sniffing at a new object dropped into its cage, paws busy, whiskers going, doing all the things a curious and thoroughly...
Ten-Kilo Telescope Built Like a Crab's Eye Could Finally Map the Whole Moon's Chemistry
3+ day, 3+ hour ago (113+ words) Look closely at a lobster sometime and you will notice its eyes do something ours cannot. Instead of a single lens, each eye is a dense grid of tiny...
A Single Enzyme Gone Rogue May Drive Alzheimer's, and One Molecule Can Calm It Down
3+ day, 4+ hour ago (462+ words) She still calls it Compound 10. Not CPD10, the formal name buried in the patent paperwork, but Compound 10, the way you might refer to a stubborn houseguest you have come to know rather well. Ursula Quitterer has spent close to twenty years…...
Scientists Have Written the Rules for First Contact, and Step One Is Don't Panic
5+ day, 4+ hour ago (322+ words) A strange blip arrives on a radio telescope feed at three in the morning, narrow in frequency, drifting in the way you would expect of something far away...
Three Common Sleep Habits Linked to Signs of Brain Aging
5+ day, 4+ hour ago (29+ words) A daytime nap feels like a small mercy. Twenty minutes on the sofa, a quick reset, and you wake sharper than before. Yet of all the things 23, 000...