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2023/09/13 #

  • Nasa says distant exoplanet could have rare water ocean and possible hint of life - The planet is 9 times the size of earth, might have oceans, and they have detected some hints of molecules that on Earth are emmitted by phytoplankton. The discovery was made by the James Webb telescope, which was able to capture light from the planet's star that had passed through it's atmosphere. And that all happened 120 light years away. Mindblowing. Some other cool examples of JWT detections listed at the end of the article. www.theguardian.com #

  • From zero to one hundred in 0.956 seconds - This caught my eye because I had the opportunity many years ago to be driven on the back of a very fast motorbike. I think it was 0-100 in around 3 seconds and it totally freaked me out. I just can't imagine there could be anything 3 times faster than that. Anyhow interesting story, the cigar shaped car was built by students and has a vacuum suction device to keep it on the ground before it's aerodynamics kick in. ethz.ch #

  • 🚀 New Post: The Mental Health Deception - How we view mental health issues has changed a lot in my lifetime. We didn't really even have non-derogatory ways of talking about it. It's a lot better these days but I think we still need to evolve our understanding of the topic. markjgsmith.com #

  • Physicists Observe ‘Unobservable’ Quantum Phase Transition - Scientists have been able to not only entangle constellations of many particles simultaneously, but by measuring their state in a clever way, stochastically, use the measuring as a way to have some control over the entanglement, since measurement causes entanglement collapse. And by doing that they were able to explore the entire entanglement space. Similar to how many materials go through phase transitions, say from liquid water to solid ice, there appears to be phase transitions in the quantum world. The weird thing is that it's not a material per se it's literally a phase transition in information, where the information shared between two things undergoes an abrupt change. As well as cool science, it's a tale of multiple reasearch groups discovering each other and combining forces. The story mixes in quantum computers, entanglement entropy and even time crystals in what is defo one of the best science writeups I've read this year. www.quantamagazine.org #

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