When the Meniscus Disappears
The article highlights supercritical fluids, a fourth state of matter that blends the diffusion of gases with the solvating power of liquids. It explains how carbon dioxide surpasses its critical temperature of 31 °C and pressure of 73 bar, erasing the traditional liquid‑gas boundary on a phase diagram. Visual examples, such as decaffeinating coffee beans, illustrate practical uses. The piece underscores the scientific curiosity sparked by Steve Mould’s video on this anomalous phase.
Feeding Time at the AGN Zoo
The paper links Fermi‑detected blazars and radio galaxies through their accretion and jet radiation mechanisms, analyzing 838 BL Lacs, 784 FSRQs, 55 LERGs and 17 HERGs. Gamma‑ray photon index versus luminosity separates BL Lacs from FSRQs and shows HERGs align with FSRQs...
Clean Planet Moves From Validation to Commercialization
Clean Planet has moved from research validation to commercial rollout, securing a ¥1 billion grant from Tokyo’s Zero Emission program in April 2025 and a ¥500 million strategic equity round in January 2026. The company now promotes its QHe IKAROS heat module,...
The Many Worlds Interpretation Has Exhausted Its Chips
The blog post argues that the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics suffers a fundamental flaw: its branch‑counting probability measure μ is undefined without a preferred basis, making empirical predictions impossible. It likens this structural deficiency to the Rayleigh‑Jeans...
On the State of Cosmology
The essay argues that modern cosmology is in a methodological crisis because the Copernican principle has been elevated from a testable hypothesis to an immutable axiom, blocking the incorporation of anomalous data. Recent observations, notably a 5‑sigma quadrupole alignment in...
Icy or Rocky Giants?
A new simulation study suggests Uranus and Neptune may be more rocky than icy, challenging the traditional "icy giant" label. Researchers generated thousands of interior configurations that simultaneously satisfy gravitational data and thermodynamic constraints, revealing both water‑rich and rock‑dominant possibilities....
Quantum Repeaters: Overcoming Loss for Long-Distance Entanglement
The blog explains how quantum repeaters overcome photon loss to enable long‑distance entanglement, turning quantum communication from a laboratory curiosity into a deployable technology. By storing and swapping entangled photons across a chain of short fiber links, repeaters can extend...
Night Sky Highlights for March 2026
March 2026 offers a packed celestial calendar, highlighted by a total lunar eclipse on March 3 that will turn the Moon a deep red. A rare Venus‑Saturn conjunction peaks mid‑month, while the vernal equinox on March 20 marks the astronomical start of spring....
Early Summer Predictive Wildfire Outlooks: Significant Wildfire Potential Remains, But What Does It Look Like Compared To Last Year?
Predictive Services unveiled new spring‑summer wildfire potential maps, highlighting that significant fire risk persists into early summer. March has already recorded above‑average temperatures and below‑average precipitation across the western United States, intensifying drought conditions. The outlook suggests an early‑season fire...
Swirling Without Blades
Researchers observed a ring of hydrogen bubbles rising and rotating clockwise during electrolysis, despite the absence of any fan blades. The rotation is caused by a Lorentz force generated by the interaction of electric currents and magnetic fields in the...
A Wandering Supermassive Black Hole Eating a Star
Astronomers have identified AT2024tvd, a tidal disruption event occurring 0.8 kiloparsecs (≈2,600 light‑years) from the nucleus of a massive galaxy 600 million light‑years away. Multi‑wavelength observations from ZTF, Swift, Pan‑STARRS, and XMM‑Newton were modeled with the kerrSED accretion‑disk framework, revealing a black hole...
Osterwalder-Schrader and Euclidean Spinor Fields
The 1972 Osterwalder‑Schrader framework tackles the long‑standing problem of Wick rotating spinor fields by introducing a pair of independent fermionic variables, effectively doubling the degrees of freedom when moving from Minkowski to Euclidean space. Their construction preserves the Dirac adjoint...
Matrilineal Networks May Be the Key to Understanding Neanderthal Mixture
A team led by Alexander Platt, Daniel Harris and Sarah Tishkoff published a new Science paper showing that early African DNA entered Neanderthal genomes about 250,000 years ago, leaving a strong excess of African ancestry on the Neanderthal X chromosome....
Harmonic Oscillators
The post reviews the quantum harmonic oscillator in the Heisenberg picture, showing how ladder operators $a$ and $a^\dagger$ solve the equations of motion and generate the familiar energy spectrum. It then contrasts this elementary construction with the Osterwalder‑Schrader (OS) Euclidean framework, noting that the...
Hypothesis: If AI Is Bad at Originality, It’s a Documentation Problem
OpenAI teamed with particle‑physics amplitudes researchers to apply reasoning‑type language models to a puzzling non‑zero calculation. The AI iteratively generated a compact formula and mathematically proved its correctness, turning a messy multi‑particle result into a simple expression. The breakthrough highlights...
“Frozen”
The article explores how water behaves fundamentally differently for microscopic invertebrates, where surface tension outweighs gravity. At this scale, droplets cling to spiky hairs and retain a perfect spherical shape. Even pond surfaces act like elastic trampolines, allowing tiny creatures...
Understanding Schlieren
The article explains schlieren imaging, an optical technique that makes density variations in fluids visible. It focuses on a spherical‑mirror configuration that can render invisible gases, candle plumes, and shock waves detectable on camera. Sample images show carbon‑dioxide vortex rings...
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #9 2026
The latest Skeptical Science weekly roundup highlights mounting climate risks across multiple sectors. A new study finds 67% of U.S. national parks are vulnerable to transformative impacts such as fire, drought, and sea‑level rise, while research on extreme fire weather...