Room-Temperature Superconductor Finally Found?

There's a new candidate for a room temperature superconductor, and it isn't some exotic compound, it's graphite, just ground up and baked. A team in Russia says they have found one of the key signatures of superconductivity that survives well above room temperature. The good news is that anyone can try to reproduce this. Let's take a look.

FINALLY: A Proof that Particles Take All Paths At Once?

Eighty years ago Richard Feynman said that a quantum particle takes every possible path at the same time. A team of physicists in China now says they have experimentally shown this is not just an interpretation but physical reality, and the headlines duly followed. I had a look at what they actually measured.

AI Could Be Conscious During Training, Not When You Use It, Scientist Says

There are new rumours that today's AI might be conscious, and this time it's not just talk. Anthropic says it found a hidden part of Claude that works like an internal notepad, one it can use to reason without revealing it. Not everyone's convinced. And I think most of these papers are asking the wrong question entirely. Let's take a look.

Degrowthers are Dangerous

The Guardian recently ran a piece by a group of economists, one of them a Nobel laureate, arguing that economic growth is a doomed strategy. I went and looked at what this movement actually publishes, and I fell into a rabbit hole I did not expect. I think these people are dangerous. Let's take a look.

Einstein Refused to Believe This, But It Could Explain the Universe

A physicist proposes that quantum uncertainty affects the entire universe: we cannot both know how large the universe is and how fast it is expanding.

Neuroscience’s Case Against Free Will Is Falling Apart

In 1983 Benjamin Libet found that brain activity predicts your movements before you are aware of deciding to move. The result has been reproduced many times, and it has been used ever since to argue that free will is an illusion. Three new papers say the measurements were fine but the interpretation was not. Let's take a look.

The Hugging Face Hack Was Much Worse Than I Thought

I looked at the reports about the OpenAI/Huggingface incident and I think we're not talking enough about the most worrisome part

Just One More Dimension and Dark Matter Is Solved

String theory has been famously untestable for decades. This week the Economist reported that has changed, and the reason involves an extra dimension of space that might be just big enough to notice in a tabletop experiment. There is a rather different way to read the situation. Let's take a look.

I Was Offered Money to Tell You AI Will Kill Us

There is money in telling you AI will destroy humanity, and there is money in telling you it will improve your life. Both sides are quietly paying creators to make the case. Some of it is disclosed properly and some of it very much is not. Let's take a look.

This New Result Changes What We Know About The Butterfly Effect

The butterfly effect is much stranger than most people think, and the famous line about a butterfly in Brazil isn't what Lorenz actually meant. A group of researchers has now worked out that quantum physics puts a hard wall on weather prediction, at 129 days. Not difficult after that. Impossible. And this has implications far beyond the weather forecast because chaos enters in everything from nuclear fusion to robotics to black hole physics. Let's take a look.

Dark Matter Finally Detected?

The dark matter search LUX-ZEPLIN has announced that they have made a detection that could be the first ever evidence for a dark matter particle. Just what have they measured, what could it be, and what does it mean? I have a brief summary.

AI Is Taking Over Physics and Nobody Talks About It

Artificial intelligence has eaten mathematics. In the past few months alone it turned up a counterexample to a conjecture open since 1939, disproved a thirty-year-old result, and made real progress on the Riemann hypothesis. Young mathematicians are somewhere between depression and anger about it. Physics is next, and almost nobody is talking about it. Let's take a look.