In real life, laws are broken all the time. Besides your everyday criminals, there are scammers and fraudsters, politicians and mobsters, corporations and nations that regard laws as suggestions rather than restrictions. It’s not that way in physics. For centuries, physicists have been identifying laws of nature that are invariably unbreakable. Those laws govern matter, … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Science News is collecting reader questions about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The masses of neutrinos are less than a millionth that of the next lightest particle, the electron, but no one … Read more
Quantum entanglement has made its way to the top. Scientists have measured the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement in top quarks, the heaviest fundamental subatomic particles known. It’s the first detection of entanglement between pairs of quarks — a class of subatomic particles that make up larger particles, including protons and neutrons. Particles that are … Read more
For the first time, a quantum computer has improved its results by repeatedly fixing its own mistakes midcalculation with a technique called quantum error correction. Scientists have long known that quantum computers need error correction to meet their potential to solve problems that stump standard, “classical” computers (SN: 6/22/20). Quantum computers calculate with quantum bits, or qubits, which … Read more
The rotation of the Earth has been measured many times – but never like this. At first, scientists used entangled quantum particles called photons to detect the speed at which the globe spins. The achievement is a step toward investigating one of physics’ greatest mysteries: how the tiny world of quantum physics interacts with gravity. … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? In recent years, science fiction writers have seized on the mystique of the kugelblitz and chased after it. Fans … Read more