05 Sci-Tech
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In 2022 three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for proving something astonishing: the universe is not locally real. In other words, particles don’t have fixed properties until they are measured. Although it seems to counter everything we perceive, the discovery was established by some of the most rigorous experiments ever conducted, and it aligns with a prediction Albert Einstein and his colleagues made almost 100 years ago: that particles strangely influence one another, even across vast distances. Today quantum strangeness is no longer confined to theory. Researchers are entangling objects large enough to see, quantum computers are on the cusp of solving problems no classical machine can touch, and speculative ideas such as vacuum decay and alternative realities are serious science. The quantum era has arrived.
Bizarre quantum dynamics underpin our view of reality: Time travels forward for us, but in the quantum world, it may flow in two directions. Gravity itself may follow quantum rules. Quantum mechanics supports the possibility of alternative universes, but even if they exist, we can’t access them (and probably shouldn’t anyway). Some physicists argue that quantum rules dictate that everything in the universe is preordained, making free will an illusion, so we might as well accept our current reality.
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The U.S. Department of Energy has ordered another power plant, this time an oil and gas plant in Pennsylvania, to keep its turbines running through the hottest summer months as a precaution against electricity shortfalls in the 13-state mid-Atlantic grid.
The department’s order to the grid operator, PJM Interconnection, regarding the Eddystone power plant just south of Philadelphia on the Delaware River, is the department’s second use of federal power under President Donald Trump to require a power plant to keep operating on the mainland United States.
Constellation Energy had planned to shut down Eddystone’s units 3 and 4 on Saturday, but Trump’s Department of Energy ordered the company to continue operating the units until at least Aug. 28. The units can produce a combined 760 megawatts.
The department, in its order, cited PJM’s growing concerns about power shortfalls amid the shutdown of aging power plants and rising electricity demand.
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Republican and Democratic Senate leaders applauded the recent reintroduction of an internet regulation bill. The legislation had previously faced opposition from a smorgasbord of LGBTQ, free speech, and conservative voices and it’s unclear whether their concerns are addressed in the new bill.
The Kids Online Safety Act passed the United States Senate last year in a 91-3 vote. It had support that ran the gamut from then-President Joe Biden to Tesla and X chief and Donald Trump megadonor Elon Musk. But the House of Representatives never voted on it, and it had to be reintroduced in the new 119th Congress.
It was reintroduced in the Senate on May 14 by its authors U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), with support from Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York).
According to a bill summary authored by the Library of Congress, the legislation would require “applications or services that connect to the internet and are likely to be used by minors” to “act in the best interest of a minor using its application or service. This includes a duty to prevent and mitigate heightened risks of harms that may arise from using the platform.”
African swine fever circulating in Europe linked to earlier introduction, not new outbreak– phys.org
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A study in Genome Biology and Evolution finds that the African Swine Fever virus, currently circulating in Europe, is not the result of a recent introduction. Instead, the virus has been present in the region since 2007. Its current dramatic spread appears to be driven largely by people within Europe traveling longer distances. The paper is titled “Exploiting viral DNA genomes to explore the dispersal history of African swine fever genotype II lineages in Europe.”
African Swine Fever virus is a highly virulent DNA virus that causes a severe hemorrhagic disease of the same name, affecting both domestic pigs and wild boars. The disease is characterized by high mortality rates, leading to significant economic losses in the pork industry.
According to estimates from the Food and Agriculture Organization, the virus has led to approximately $2.1 billion in direct economic losses over the past 17 years. Additionally, the outbreak has destroyed many small and medium-sized farms, contributing to structural transformations in agricultural markets, notably in China. Currently, there is no vaccine against the virus available widely.
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Excerpt:On September 16, 2023, an unusual seismic signal shook the world. It appeared like clockwork every 90 seconds and lasted for 9 consecutive days.
A month later, a similar signal reappeared and lasted for another week before disappearing.
Scientists have since determined that these seismic anomalies were triggered by 2 massive landslides which ripped through a remote fjord in east Greenland. The rock-ice avalanche generated mega-tsunamis which reached 200m high at points and even damaged an empty military base.
Researchers believed these massive waves triggered a “seiche” (pronounced saish) or standing wave, which sloshed back and forth within the ford beating on either side like a drum to produce the very long signals.
But a Danish military vessel surveying the Dickson fjord just 3 days into the first seismic event never saw such a wave. In fact, until now the only evidence came from analytical and numerical models.
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Researchers from the University of Rochester and University of California, Santa Barbara, engineered a laser device smaller than a penny that they say could power everything from the LiDAR systems used in self-driving vehicles to gravitational wave detection, one of the most delicate experiments in existence to observe and understand our universe.
Laser-based measurement techniques, known as optical metrology, can be used to study the physical properties of objects and materials. But current optical metrology requires bulky and expensive equipment to achieve delicate laser-wave control, creating a bottleneck for deploying streamlined, cost-effective systems.
The new chip-scale laser, described in a paper published in Light: Science & Applications, can conduct extremely fast and accurate measurements by very precisely changing its color across a broad spectrum of light at very fast rates — about 10 quintillion times per second. Unlike traditional silicon photonics, the laser is made with a synthetic material called lithium niobate and leverages a physical phenomenon known as the Pockels effect, which changes the refractive index of a material when an electric field is present.
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‘Being Catholic in public is not an offense on Columbia’s campus,’ free speech expert says
Following complaints, Columbia University’s Office of Institutional Equity recently confronted graduate student Daniel Di Martino for comments he made on social media expressing his Catholic beliefs and criticizing transgenderism.
Di Martino told The Fix the matter is now closed — but only after he went public. The doctoral student said the university closed the investigation after he published a story in City Journal detailing what happened.
The incident began when Di Martino “received an email from the OIE accusing [him] of ‘conduct that could constitute discriminatory harassment’” earlier this year, he wrote in his City Journal piece.
“The message included no details, and when [he] asked for clarification, OIE didn’t provide any,” Di Martino wrote. Then, three university officials called Di Martino in for a meeting to tell him he had been the subject of “multiple complaints.”
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A new study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics has shown that Venus has at least 20 co-orbital asteroids that could potentially approach the Earth.
The study was led by Valerio Carruba from the University of São Paulo in Brazil. In it, researchers stated that some asteroids could pose a collisional hazard to Earth. There are allegedly many asteroids that could come close to or hit Earth. One asteroid is being considered a potential “city-killer.”
The study also showed that these asteroids could be difficult to spot, which would make it more challenging to predict how they might impact Earth, if at all. There are also asteroids that scientists are not yet aware of.
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Most Americans assume the United States is the world’s unrivaled nuclear superpower. The truth is, America’s nuclear stockpile has shrunk significantly. Meanwhile, China is building nuclear weapons at a rapid pace, and arms experts believe the world’s security is now at serious risk due to the communist regime’s expansionist schemes.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has dramatically reduced the number of nuclear weapons it has deployed or in storage. That arsenal today is roughly 85 percent smaller than at the height of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and the number of operational nukes is tiny compared to 40 years ago.
America’s nuclear stockpile has fallen to levels not seen since the 1960s, while China has embarked on an unprecedented nuclear buildup.
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A new study reveals the biological secret to the Zika virus’s infectious success: Zika uses host cells’ own “self-care” system of clearing away useless molecules to suppress the host proteins that the virus has employed to get into those cells in the first place.
While these cell surface proteins are valuable for viral entry, they also have roles in producing an antiviral response. Before that can happen, the virus manipulates a process cells use to keep themselves healthy to lower the proteins’ activity, clearing the way for unfettered viral infection.
Though other viruses, such as HIV, are known to silence host receptors that let them into cells, Zika is unusual for having at least three of its own proteins that can get the job done, said Shan-Lu Liu, senior author the study and a virology professor in the Department of Veterinary Biosciences at The Ohio State University.
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On March 20, 2025, members of the World Health Organization adopted the world’s first pandemic agreement, following three years of “intensive negotiations launched by governments in response to the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.” The U.S., however, did not participate, in part because of its intention to withdraw from the WHO.
Global health experts are hailing the agreement as a historic moment.
What does the agreement mean for the world, and how can it make everyone safer and more prepared for the next pandemic?
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“This also strengthens Telegram’s financial position: we will receive $300M in cash and equity from xAI, plus 50% of the revenue from xAI subscriptions sold via Telegram.”
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov announced on Wednesday that the company has teamed up with Elon Musk’s xAI to bring the AI chatbot Grok to the messaging platform.
Durov wrote that he and Musk have agreed to a one-year partnership to bring Grok to Telegram’s users, and Grok will be integrated across all Telegram apps. “This also strengthens Telegram’s financial position: we will receive $300M in cash and equity from xAI, plus 50% of the revenue from xAI subscriptions sold via Telegram,” Durov wrote.
A video posted by Durov stated that the partnership will see Grok pinned for all users on Telegram, will appear in the search bar when asking a question, provide message editing and chat summaries, summarize documents posted in Telegram chats, and can serve as a moderator. The inclusion of Grok will begin in the “summer of 2025,” the video stated.
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MADRID: Spain’s government on Wednesday (May 28) denied a press report that an “experiment” on the national power grid caused a huge blackout that crippled the Iberian Peninsula one month ago.
Authorities have been scrambling to find answers after the Apr 28 outage cut telecommunications, halted transport and plunged cities into darkness across Spain and Portugal.
Conservative British daily newspaper The Telegraph reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources in Brussels, that Spanish authorities “were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain’s rushed phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027”.
“The government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly, before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st-century smart grid capable of handling it,” it added.
Asked about the report in parliament, Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen said: “It is false, totally false, that the government carried out any sort of experiment on the grid prior to the outage.”
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Get ready for several years of even more record-breaking heat that pushes Earth to more deadly, fiery and uncomfortable extremes, two of the world’s top weather agencies forecast.
There’s an 80 per cent chance the world will break another annual temperature record in the next five years, and it’s even more probable that the world will again exceed the international temperature threshold set 10 years ago, according to a five-year forecast released Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.K. Meteorological Office.
“Higher global mean temperatures may sound abstract, but it translates in real life to a higher chance of extreme weather: stronger hurricanes, stronger precipitation, droughts,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the calculations but said they made sense. “So higher global mean temperatures translates to more lives lost.”
With every tenth of a degree the world warms from human-caused climate change “we will experience higher frequency and more extreme events (particularly heat waves but also droughts, floods, fires and human-reinforced hurricanes/typhoons),” emailed Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He was not part of the research.
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Artistic mediums certainly change. While modern humans have paint and paper, ancient humans had ochre and pebbles. However, both work well for finger painting, whether for Homo sapiens today or for Homo neanderthalensis thousands of years ago.
According to a new study in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, a team of researchers may have discovered one of the oldest art objects adorned with a fingerprint from across Europe. The object, a pebble, was stamped with ochre by a Neanderthal around 43,000 years ago and was found by researchers in Spain in 2022.
“This object contributes to our understanding of Neanderthals’ capacity for abstraction,” the researchers stated in their study, as it could “represent one of the oldest known abstractions of a human face in the prehistoric record.”
Indeed, the placement of the ochre fingerprint could suggest that Neanderthals were more advanced artists than traditionally thought, adorning objects not only with fingerprints but with human faces, as well.
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In a groundbreaking move for aerospace engineering, SpaceX launched the ninth integrated test flight of its Starship Super Heavy system from Starbase in South Texas on Tuesday evening. Unlike previous missions aimed at precision landings, this flight intentionally ended in a powerful splashdown. The goal was to gather critical data on the rocket’s structural limits and boost progress toward full reusability. This dramatic crash was a calculated experiment, marking a pivotal step in SpaceX’s mission to create reliable, reusable launch systems for future space exploration, including routine missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
SpaceX Starship lost control in mid-flight causing mission to end with ocean crash
At 7:36 p.m. EDT (2336 GMT), the completely integrated Starship launch vehicle — consisting of the upper-stage Starship spacecraft riding on top of the Super Heavy booster — departed from SpaceX’s Starbase complex on the Gulf Coast near Brownsville, Texas.The launch was live-streamed on SpaceX’s webcast, with observers seeing the rocket rise into the evening sky. The firing of Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines created a powerful plume of fire, exhaust, and water vapor, marking another milestone in the company’s long-term build-out of fully reusable spaceflight systems.For the first time, a previously launched Super Heavy booster powered a Starship flight — an important step toward SpaceX’s larger goal of routine, reusable spaceflight. This specific booster had been upgraded since its previous mission and was being asked to prove it could withstand repeated launches and touchdowns.A few minutes into flight, the first-stage booster broke away from the upper-stage Starship vehicle as anticipated. But SpaceX lost communication with the booster during descent, and it’s thought to have crashed into the ocean instead of executing the controlled splashdown SpaceX had intended. This kept engineers from capturing the full range of descent and landing data, though initial flight data will still be helpful.