First, the good news for time travelers. Physicists have long recognized that nothing in the laws of physics specifically forbids time travel. As far as they can tell, these laws don’t care whether time is running forwards or backwards; they work just as well either way.That recognition has spawned numerous studies, some of them surprisingly serious, to test the limits of causality. In this work, physicists have tried everything from bending the fabric of spacetime to exploiting quantum uncert ...read more
If you think of bird flu as a stew, it appears that the latest batch has been simmering on low heat for a few years — at least for humans. Could it boil over into a pandemic?Although there has been a slight uptick in human cases since the avian flu subtype named H5N1 appeared in North America about four years ago, science suggests that a full-fledged human pandemic is unlikely. “There's no human-to-human transmission,” said Demetre Daskalakis, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevent ...read more
After a series of technical hiccups prevented Boeing’s Starliner capsule from bringing NASA astronauts Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore back to Earth in August 2024, it appears that yet another delay will keep the two in space for an extra few months. Suni and Butch, who were launched aboard the first ever crewed mission of the Starliner (the Boeing Crew Flight Test) in June 2024, will now have to wait until late March 2025 or early April 2025 to return home. What Went Wrong w ...read more
In 2024, volunteers like you made more than 2.5 MILLION data contributions to SciStarter Affiliate projects alone! Science thanks you! And while we appreciate each and every one of you, in this year-end edition of the newsletter, we highlight the top 10 participants based on data contributions.You’ll also find our Top Ten Projects based on participation in projects ranging from tracking squirrels to discovering black holes; Top Five Projects to Watch in 2025; and citizen science in the news t ...read more
It’s easy to forget that humans are primates, but indeed we are. Taxonomic classification puts humans in the order Primates (apes, monkeys, and lemurs) and in the family Hominidae (great apes), which, in addition to humans, includes chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. Humans are different from other primates in several ways, our facility with spoken and written language being one of the most obvious.But another obvious difference is that somewhere along the evolutionary path, human ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine