Have you ever been watching a sci-fi show like Star Trek or Stargate, and someone mentions neutronium? Ever wonder what neutronium even is? I this video I give a quick run down of the interesting properties and meanings of this very strange, and very dangerous hypothetical element.
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Beneath Enceladus’s frozen surface, the moon’s ocean could contain phosphorus, a key ingredient for building cells.
CERN physicist Jamie Boyd enters a tunnel close to the ATLAS detector, an experiment at the largest particle accelerator in the world. From there, he turns into an underground space labeled TI12.
“This is a very special tunnel,” Boyd says, “because this is where the old transfer line used to exist for the Large Electron-Positron Collider, before the Large Hadron Collider.” After the LHC was built, a new transfer line was added, “and this tunnel was then abandoned.”
The tunnel is abandoned no more. Its new resident is an experiment much humbler in size than the neighboring ATLAS detector. Five meters in length, the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment, or FASER, detector sits in a shallow excavated trench in the floor, surrounded by low railings and cables.
The eccentric billionaire has said he’ll ask for an exemption to US sanctions on Iran to provide Spacelink internet access to the country.
New research inspired by ice giants like Neptune and Uranus shows lasers can transform a common plastic into tiny diamonds.
My science fiction story “Le Saga Electrik” has been published in All Worlds Wayfarer Literary Magazine! You can read it for free at the link. In this tale, I weave a sensuously baroque drama of love, war, and redemption set in a post-singularity simulation world that runs on a computronium dust cloud orbiting a blue star somewhere in deep space. I draw from diverse literary-poetic influences to create a mythos which crackles and buzzes with phosphorescent intensity!
Le Saga Electrik by Logan Thrasher Collins
In the great domain of Zeitgeist, Ekatarinas decided that the time to replicate herself had come. Ekatarinas was drifting within a virtual environment rising from ancient meshworks of maths coded into Zeitgeist’s neuromorphic hyperware. The scape resembled a vast ocean replete with wandering bubbles of technicolor light and kelpy strands of neon. Hot blues and raspberry hues mingled alongside electric pinks and tangerine fizzies. The avatar of Ekatarinas looked like a punkish angel, complete with fluorescent ink and feathery wings and a lip ring. As she drifted, the trillions of equations that were Ekatarinas came to a decision. Ekatarinas would need to clone herself to fight the entity known as Ogrevasm.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-long cosmic explosions that each produce the energy equivalent to the sun’s annual output. More than 15 years after the deep-space pulses of electromagnetic radio waves were first discovered, their perplexing nature continues to surprise scientists – and newly published research only deepens the mystery surrounding them.
These are the most detailed Neptune images since Voyager 2’s 1989 flyby, and they reveal Neptune’s rings and clouds in stunning detail.
The hunt for alien worlds is more difficult than it may seem. Without the ability to travel through the cosmos, we’re left to look through telescopes and collect data to determine whether other planets lie in wait. Now, though, astronomers say they may have figured out a way to make the search for these alien worlds much easier, and it relies on a technique that looks for debris fields.
Feng Long, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and the Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics, says she discovered a possible new technique that can make finding alien worlds much easier. Instead of relying on blindly sifting through data, Long looked for material and fields of debris at the Lagrange points. She published a paper on the technique and her findings in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The Lagrange points can be thought of as parking places in space. These points are notable because they act as an intersection of the different gravitational fields between celestial structures. Essentially, these points act as a middle ground between gravitational pulls. As such, the pull of gravity from all objects is equal. So, debris from developing alien worlds may congregate here, Long says.
Mark T. Vande Hei did experiments, spacewalked, and even did house chores and worked out. He loved to meditate with Earth in full view.
