Utada: What are you most focused on pursuing at the moment? Kojima: There is a theory in particle physics called the Standard Model, but it can only explain about 5 percent of the mass and energy in the universe. In fact, it is thought that about 26 percent of the mass and energy in the…
The unevenness of the state of each cloud layer is thought to be the reason why the brightness of SIMP 0136 changes as it rotates. It’s easy to understand if you think of Jupiter, which as a gas giant planet likely has a similar structure and chemical composition. Or for another way to picture this,…
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. An oil tanker carrying jet fuel was recently hit by a cargo ship while at anchor 13 miles off the east coast of England. This set off a series of large explosions and a huge plume of black smoke, while a still unknown…
So the UK government signed two partnerships: one with BioNTech to provide 10,000 patients with access to personalized cancer treatments by 2030, and a 10-year investment with Moderna in an innovation and technology center with capacity to produce up to 250 million vaccines. The stars were aligned. During the pandemic, the UK was opening clinical…
I expected to meet a dreaded “man-eater,” but when I saw it, I realized that it was a defenseless animal, more afraid of me than I was of it. That moment aroused my curiosity, and I decided to learn more about sharks. I travelled to the island of Guadalupe off the Pacific coast of Mexico…
In other words, Hilbert’s 10th problem is undecidable. Mathematicians hoped to follow the same approach to prove the extended, rings-of-integers version of the problem—but they hit a snag. Gumming Up the Works The useful correspondence between Turing machines and Diophantine equations falls apart when the equations are allowed to have non-integer solutions. For instance, consider…
Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel for the shareholder advocacy nonprofit As You Sow, said disclosure is a prerequisite for holding banks to their climate goals. ”We want to understand what it is they’re doing,” she said. Laws like California’s bring to light the financial instability wrought by fossil-fuel-driven climate change and—in theory, at least—discourage financing…
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Scores of wildfires broke out across North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in early March 2025 as strong winds, abnormally dry conditions, and low humidity combined to kindle and spread the flames. The fires followed a year of weather whiplash in the Carolinas,…
SpaceX has contracts with NASA worth approximately $4 billion to design and develop a human-rated Moon lander based on the Starship design. The Starship lander is a central piece of NASA’s architecture for the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade. For Starship to fly to the Moon,…
If you took introductory physics, you learned about the “fundamental forces.” It goes something like this: All interactions are the result of one or more of five basic forces: strong nuclear, weak nuclear, gravity, electric, and magnetic. “Doing physics,” then, means identifying the forces in play. There’s a problem, though, which might not have been…
