Researcher Offers New Theory on ‘Venus’ Figurines

Sensing body at all scales Applications and challenges of sensing technology have been accelerated by Covid-19.

Australian telescope maps 3 million galaxies in just 300 hours

Physicists capture sound of a “perfect” fluid

Time Flows Toward Order Revisiting the gospel of the second law of thermodynamics.

The Universal Law That Aims Time’s Arrow A new look at a ubiquitous phenomenon has uncovered unexpected fractal behavior that could give us clues about the early universe and the arrow of time.

This Will Help You Grasp the Sizes of Things in the Universe

Acedia: the lost name for the emotion we’re all feeling right now

Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Snowflakes

Exit surfaces with significant patches of negative scalar curvature are strongly suppressed in a holographic measure in Einstein gravity.A random, out-of-context quote from Stephen Hawking’s final paper that doesn’t really make sense unless you already know a bunch about science.

Physicists Nail Down the ‘Magic Number’ That Shapes the Universe A team in Paris has made the most precise measurement yet of the fine-structure constant, killing hopes for a new force of nature.

A New Map of All the Particles and Forces We’ve created a new way to explore the fundamental constituents of the universe.

9 pieces of practical advice about bullying

The Search for Dark Matter Is Dramatically ExpandingPhysicists plan to leave no stone unturned, checking whether dark matter tickles different types of detectors, nudges starlight, warms planetary cores or even lodges in rocks.

The Hidden Magnetic Universe Begins to Come Into View

The Quantum Internet Will Blow Your Mind. Here’s What It Will Look Like The next generation of the Internet will rely on revolutionary new tech — allowing for unhackable networks and information that travels faster than the speed of light.

A New Theorem Maps Out the Limits of Quantum Physics

A hint of new physics in polarized radiation from the early universe

What Can the Pandemic Teach Us About Human Nature?Isolation, loneliness and resistance to health guidelines: Scientists are evaluating the psychological impact of the COVID pandemic.

The Pandemic Put Science in the Spotlight

6 Ways the Coronavirus Pandemic Changed Science

Researchers observe what could be the first hints of dark bosons

Extremely light and weakly interacting particles may play a crucial role in cosmology and in the ongoing search for dark matter. Unfortunately, however, these particles have so far proved very difficult to detect using existing high-energy colliders. Researchers worldwide have thus been trying to develop alternative technologies and methods that could enable the detection of these particles.

Yike, what a collection, I’ll try to read them all later.

> Researcher Offers New Theory on ‘Venus’ Figurines

Rubbish article. Venus figurines are pornography. Nothing to do with frikkin’ climate change.

> Sensors that track everything from infection in the lungs to WiFi usage on a busy university campus are poised to enhance our understanding of, and approach to improving, human health at many levels

No.

> https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/1/australian-telescope-maps-3-million-galaxies-in-just-300-hours

“ASKAP. What makes this telescope unique is its wide field of view. The telescope only needed to combine 903 images to map the sky”

Looks like they’re going to use this to speed to find transient objects. Good luck, they’ll need it.

> https://www.miragenews.com/physicists-capture-sound-of-a-perfect-fluid/

“Scientists can now use the fluid as a model of other, more complicated perfect flows, to estimate the viscosity of the plasma in the early universe, as well as the quantum friction within neutron stars”

Or you could just use the Euler equation.

> http://nautil.us/issue/93/forerunners/time-flows-toward-order

Rubbish article. The evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to modern day does not violate thermodynamics.

> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-universal-law-that-aims-times-arrow-20190801/

“far-from-equilibrium systems exhibit fractal-like behaviour, which means they look very much the same at different spatial and temporal scales”

Meh.

> http://nautil.us/blog/-this-will-help-you-grasp-the-sizes-of-things-in-the-universe

“Caleb Scharf wants to take you on an epic tour of his latest book, The Zoomable Universe”

Of course he does. Of course he does.

> https://theconversation.com/acedia-the-lost-name-for-the-emotion-were-all-feeling-right-now-144058

“We’re bored, listless, afraid and uncertain. What is this feeling?”

It’s called “ennui”, you dope.

> https://www.quantamagazine.org/toward-a-grand-unified-theory-of-snowflakes-20191219/

All darn empirical, where’s the computation? I was wondering about having a go at this myself some time. However, having never seen a six-sided snowflake was a bit of a drawback.

> https://theoutline.com/post/4535/stephen-hawking-final-paper-normal-science

“The Higgs boson wasn’t the only bet Hawking didn’t get right. He was also wrong in thinking that the gamma-ray source Cygnus X-1 was not a black hole (it was). And in believing that black holes destroy information (they don’t).”

LOL. Yep. That’s Hawking.

“Hawking’s final paper, titled “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?” …

“the average age of a Nobel recipient in physics for the past twenty years is 67.”

:-(
Nobel created it to encourage young recipients by providing them with funds they needed for research.

“AdS/CFT correspondence — an outrageously popular (among high-energy physicists) and mathematically arcane (among everyone else) theory that combines gravitational and quantum perspectives.”

LOL. Yes. I like this writer.