The unbearable blandness of the 2020s

In today's rant I complain that I now sound like every other YouTuber.

Biologists Say They Cracked One of Life’s Biggest Mysteries

Life on Earth has a peculiar property – many biological molecules have a handedness, or a “chirality.” DNA twists one way and not the other, and all the rest of life must fit to this reality. In a new paper, researchers say they know why: It all comes down to physics! The answer could change our understanding of life across the universe. Let’s take a look.

This Startup Promises Energy From Nothing—Here's What's Wrong

The company Casimir Inc promises "unlimited power" from the vacuum by using the Casimir effect. Here is why you shouldn't believe what they say.

These new nuclear reactors solve the safety problem

Generating electricity via nuclear fission is a great idea, at least in principle. But the risk of nuclear meltdowns causing mass destruction and long-lasting contamination isn’t appealing. Luckily, a crop of companies are looking to solve this problem by creating subcritical nuclear reactors, which generate power without ever making runaway nuclear reactions possible. Let’s take a look.

AI Will Hit a Wall in 2026, if nothing changes.

Current AI technology seems to be making decent progress despite concerns about it slowing over time. But while AI is slowly becoming more “intelligent”, the industry is running into another problem: energy supply. Let’s take a look at why energy is quickly becoming a major problem for progress in AI.

Einstein's Theory Has a Problem -- This Idea Solves It

Physicists have been trying to reconcile the differences between Einstein’s theory of spacetime and our observations of quantum mechanics for almost a century. One way that they’ve attempted to do this involves theories that treat space as one-dimensional at very short distances. In a recent paper, physicists claim that they’ve solved a major problem that’s plagued these theories for decades. Does this finally solve the problem? Let’s take a look.

Quantum physics is an unnecessary complication, researchers say

To this day, researchers don’t fully understand quantum physics. But in a new paper, physicists from MIT say that that’s okay – because the phenomena we use quantum physics to explain can actually be understood using classical physics. Really? Let’s take a look.

New Theory Explains How Time Began

The biggest open problem in the foundations of physics is that Einstein’s theory of gravity, General Relativity, does not cooperate with quantum mechanics. Physicists have tried to solve this issue by coming up with a theory of quantum gravity, but those theories fall apart when you need them most – inside of black holes and at the Big Bang. Recently, though, physicists published a new calculation for the Big Bang, with a theory called quadratic gravity, which lets us skip over quantum gravity entirely, and that could explain the origin of time. Let’s take a look.

Bacteria could survive trip on asteroid, scientists find

That life might have come to earth traveling through outer space used to be a fringe theory called ‘panspermia’. But in the past decade or so, we have seen an interesting shift in how scientists regard the idea. Let’s take at one new study that might support ‘panspermia,’ as well as other facts that support the theory.