What's Coming in 2018?

What can we look forward to, science breakthrough-wise, in the near future, say this year?

By Philip Ball in The Guardian

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Best Singularity Stories of 2014, Week 15

What is the world is a Multiverse?

When you think about our Universe, the scale of it is hard to conceive of. Each of us is just a simple human being, a little under two meters tall; a collection of just under 10^28 atoms.

Yet our Earth is — literally —more than a million times larger than us in all three dimensions: a nearly perfect sphere more than 10,000 kilometers in diameter.

But what we have access to is so much more than just the Earth. Just going another factor of a million larger than Earth — in all dimensions, again — we encompass all the bodies we know of in the Solar System. The Sun, all the planets, moons, asteroids, comets, centaurs and man-made probes are contained within a sphere of 10^10 km, a million times larger than the size of the Earth in every direction.

Supersonic Air Travel - Windows, Out. Screens, In

No matter what perks airlines take away from you, the one thing you can still count on is a genuine peek at the clouds at 35,000 feet. That might go away, too, one day, replaced with a virtual reality version of the iconic airplane window.

Spike Aerospace, a Boston engineering firm that’s developing a small supersonic jet, recently caused a stir when it announced its plane wouldn’t have any windows in the passenger cabin. Instead, thin screens installed on the walls of the aircraft would display live views captured by cameras mounted outside.

Machining Ethics

For the French philosopher Paul Virilio, technological development is inextricable from the idea of the accident. As he put it, each accident is ‘an inverted miracle… When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution.’ Accidents mark the spots where anticipation met reality and came off worse. Yet each is also a spark of secular revelation: an opportunity to exceed the past, to make tomorrow’s worst better than today’s, and on occasion to promise ‘never again’.



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Why are people so gullible? Choosing magic over physics.

Newton Blog - 11.17.13 by  Alex B. Berezow

Finally, the credulous reporter gets the help of a water diviner. Together, hand-in-hand, they use a divining rod to detect the presence of a water current under the ground. Indeed, the water diviner senses something. Exactly what, nobody knows. But this magical place gives him a headache, and he cautioned that if anybody built a house in the area, they would be dead within a year. Real estate agents, you've been warned.

Many Americans think of Europe as something of a magical realm. The food is tastier, the people are sexier, and some parts of Poland don't experience gravity. Wait, what?

European Journal, a fairly good television program produced by DW-TV, investigated what looks to be an "anti-gravity" spot in Poland. (See video beginning at the 21:00 mark.) On a road out in the Polish countryside, things appear to roll uphill, including bottles of water and even entire cars. What's going on? The people of Europe demand an answer for this very strange physical phenomenon.

Now, bear in mind that European Journal recently reported that radio waves were causing cancer in Sicily, so our expectations for the program's scientific acumen shouldn't be terribly high.

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Accelerating Toward Faster-Than-Light Travel

New York Times - 7.22.13 by Danny Hakim

“Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,” said Dr. White, 43, who runs the research project. “And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would’ve went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds.”
“Nature can do it,” he said. “So the question is, can we do it?”

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory.

Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects.



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Have You Heard the Hum?

livescience - 7.25.13 by Marc Lallanilla

Most of the people who hear the Hum (sometimes referred to as "hearers" or "hummers") describe the sound as similar to a diesel engine idling nearby. And the Hum has driven virtually every one of them to the point of despair. 

It creeps in slowly in the dark of night, and once inside, it almost never goes away.

It's known as the Hum, a steady, droning sound that's heard in places as disparate as Taos, N.M.; Bristol, England; and Largs, Scotland.

But what causes the Hum, and why it only affects a small percentage of the population in certain areas, remain a mystery, despite a number of scientific investigations.


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Rare Anti-Cyclone Flanks Friday's Tornado

The Washington Post - 6.5.13 by Jason Samenow

“At that point we bailed east towards Oklahoma City,” Wurman said. “I’m very happy my team had a radar out there. We only knew about [the anticyclonic tornado] because of the radar; otherwise we may have driven into it.”

 (AP Photo/Omaha World-Herald, Chris Machian)

Not only was Friday’s El Reno tornado the widest on record, but it was also flanked by an incredibly rare tornado that rotated in the reverse direction.

The National Weather Service confirmed Tuesday that a rare “anticyclonic” tornado touched down about three miles southeast of the monstrous 2.6-mile wide EF5 tornado that killed 9 people, including four storm chasers.

An anticyclonic tornado is one that spins clockwise rather than the conventional counterclockwise (cyclonic) direction. Precious few tornadoes are anticyclonic, and, of those, most are typically in the form of waterspouts or non-supercell thunderstorms (i.e. thunderstorms without a rotating updraft).

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First Hard Evidence for Other Universes?

Daily Galaxy - 6.1.13

"Dark Flow" sounds like a new SciFi Channel series. It's not! The dark flow is controversial because the distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for it. Its existence suggests that some structure beyond the visible universe -- outside our "horizon" -- is pulling on matter in our vicinity.

Is our universe merely one of billions? Evidence of the existence of 'multiverse' revealed for the first time by a cosmic map of background radiation data gathered by Planck telescope. This past week, the first 'hard evidence' that other universes exist has been claimed to have been found by cosmologists studying the Planck data. They have concluded that it shows anomalies that can only have been caused by the gravitational pull of other universes.

"Such ideas may sound wacky now, just like the Big Bang theory did three generations ago," says George Efstathiou, professor of astrophysics at Cambridge University."But then we got evidence and now it has changed the whole way we think about the universe."

Scientists had predicted that it should be evenly distributed, but the map shows a stronger concentration in the south half of the sky and a 'cold spot' that cannot be explained by current understanding of physics. Laura Mersini-Houghton, theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Richard Holman, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, predicted that anomalies in radiation existed and were caused by the pull from other universes in 2005. Mersini-Houghton will be in Britain soon promoting this theory and, we expect, the hard evidence at the Hay Festival on May 31 and at Oxford on June 11.

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Say Hi to the Multiverse

Scientific American - 6.1.13 by Natalie Wolchover and Simons Science News

New Physics Complications Lend Support to Multiverse Hypothesis

Image: Simons Foundation

On an overcast afternoon in late April, physics professors and students crowded into a wood-paneled lecture hall at Columbia University for a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed, a high-profile theorist visiting from the Institute for Advanced Study in nearby Princeton, N.J. With his dark, shoulder-length hair shoved behind his ears, Arkani-Hamed laid out the dual, seemingly contradictory implications of recent experimental results at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

“The universe is inevitable,” he declared. “The universe is impossible.”

The spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012 confirmed a nearly 50-year-old theory of how elementary particles acquire mass, which enables them to form big structures such as galaxies and humans. “The fact that it was seen more or less where we expected to find it is a triumph for experiment, it’s a triumph for theory, and it’s an indication that physics works,” Arkani-Hamed told the crowd.

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So What's Left to Discover in Physics?

ScienceBlogs - November 16, 2012, by Ethan

Earlier this week, evidence was presented measuring a very rare decay rate — albeit not incredibly precisely — which point towards the Standard Model being it as far as new particles accessible to colliders (such as the LHC) go. In other words, unless we get hit by a big physics surprise, the LHC will become renowned for having found the Higgs Boson and nothing else, meaning that there’s no window into what lies beyond the Standard Model via traditional experimental particle physics.

But that by no means is the same thing as saying “the Standard Model is all there is.” There are a large number of observations that tell us quite clearly that there’s very likely more to the Universe than just the quarks, leptons, and bosons of the Standard Model. While experiments are telling us that low-energy supersymmetry and extra dimensions probably don’t exist (and the LHC will either turn them up or even further constrain them towards the point of irrelevance), there are plenty of pieces of evidence that there is more to existence than these particles and their interactions.

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Dark Matter - The Unspottable Spotted?

Inside Science - November 8, 2012 by Mike Lucibella

Credit: NASA

An apparent signal from the middle of our galaxy could be the evidence physicists have long been seeking for dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to represent the missing mass in the universe.

However, at the just-concluded International Fermi Symposium in Monterey, Calif., researchers were also unable to completely rule out the possibility that a problem with their telescope is the cause of the unexpected energy signature.

Roughly 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible, and for decades scientists have been searching for an explanation. In April scientists first saw what could be the holy grail of astrophysics, an apparent signal from particles of this dark matter.



Physicists examining data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope found an unexpected spike in very high-energy particles of light, known as gamma-ray photons, coming from the galaxy's center. Multiple independent teams have since analyzed the data and offered different explanations, but no one has yet been able to definitively say if what they're seeing is a dark matter signal, or some error in the telescope.

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Is This How We'll Talk to the Animals?

LiveScience - November 1, 2012

Biologists are well-known for using lab rats in experiments, but a few may now have the chance to work with rats in a unique way.

A team of engineers has set up a system that lets lab rats control a human-shaped avatar in a virtual environment, while humans control a rat-size robot inside the rat's cage. The result? A six-foot human and a six-inch rat get to interact with each other remotely, and they get to each get to see either a virtual avatar or a robot that's close to their own size.

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The research team created the setup mostly because it was a bit unexpected — "This particular implementation and experiment were mainly to show a highly novel application," one of the team's lead scientists, Mel Slater of the University of Barcelona and University College London, wrote to TechNewsDaily in an email — but it's also part of a larger effort to build a futuristic teleconferencing technology.

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Earth's Strange Gravitational Anomaly to be Probed

POPSCI - November 2, 2012 by Rebecca Boyle

STE-QUEST Planned Orbit This map shows the ground track of the STE-QUEST satellite's 16-hour orbit. Jorge Paramos and Gerald Hechenblaikner/via arXiv

Something strange happens to spacecraft swinging past Earth for a gravity boost--they suddenly speed up, and their trajectories change in unexpected ways. It’s a tiny change, but enough that physicists have started to take notice. The European Space Agency is planning a new mission that could measure this gravity anomaly and figure out if a new, unknown physics is at work.



Before heading out to far-flung destinations in the solar system, spacecraft often slingshot around the Earth, so the planet’s gravity provides a boost to send them on their way. In several cases in the 1990s and early 2000s, scientists saw an unexplained change in spacecraft velocities after their closest Earth-shaves. They didn't see it in action, in part because the satellites weren't logged into the Deep Space Network when it happened and even when they were, there’s a 10-second delay between data acquisitions. But they knew it did happen because the spacecraft trajectories changed.

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Maybe We CAN Tell if We're in a Simulation

MIT Technology Review - October 10, 2012

One of modern physics' most cherished ideas is quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong nuclear force, how it binds quarks and gluons into protons and neutrons, how these form nuclei that themselves interact. This is the universe at its most fundamental.

So an interesting pursuit is to simulate quantum chromodynamics on a computer to see what kind of complexity arises. The promise is that simulating physics on such a fundamental level is more or less equivalent to simulating the universe itself.



There are one or two challenges of course. The physics is mind-bogglingly complex and operates on a vanishingly small scale. So even using the world's most powerful supercomputers, physicists have only managed to simulate tiny corners of the cosmos just a few femtometers across. (A femtometer is 10^-15 metres.

That may not sound like much but the significant point is that the simulation is essentially indistinguishable from the real thing (at least as far as we understand it).

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How to Detect Gravitational Vibrations

NASA - October 18, 2012

A pioneering technology capable of atomic-level precision is now being developed to detect what so far has remained imperceptible: gravitational waves or ripples in space-time caused by cataclysmic events including even the Big Bang itself.

A team of researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Stanford University in California, and AOSense, Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif., recently won funding under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to advance atom-optics technologies. Some believe this emerging, highly precise measurement technology is a technological panacea for everything from measuring gravitational waves to steering submarines and airplanes.

"I've been following this technology for a decade," said Bernie Seery, a Goddard executive who was instrumental in establishing Goddard's strategic partnership with Stanford University and AOSense two years ago. "The technology has come of age and I'm delighted NASA has chosen this effort for a NIAC award," he said.



The NIAC program supports potentially revolutionary, high-risk technologies and mission concepts that could advance NASA's objectives. "With this funding and other support, we can move ahead more quickly now, Seery said, adding that the U.S. military has invested heavily in the technology to dramatically improve navigation. "It opens up a wealth of possibilities."

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Matrix Reloaded - Can it be proved that we live in a matrix?

io9 - October 10, 2012 by George Dvorsky

Back in 2003, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a computer simulation. In his paper, Bostrom offered very little science to support his hypothesis — though he did calculate the computational requirements needed to pull of such a feat. And indeed, a philosophical claim is one thing, actually proving it is quite another. But now, a team of physicists say proof might be possible, and that it's a matter of finding a cosmological signature that would serve as the proverbial Red Pill from the Matrix. And they think they know what it is.



According to Silas Beane and his team at the University of Bonn in Germany, a simulation of the universe should still have constraints, no matter how powerful. These limitations, they argue, would be observed by the people within the simulation as a kind of constraint on physical processes.

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Star Trek Propulsion Becomes Real - Dilithium Crystal Fusion

WIRED.COM.UK - October 5, 2012 by Ian Steadman

Humanity has been in space for a while, but we really haven't managed to go very far. Carl Sagan once said that "the surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean, and recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep" -- that was in 1980, and we haven't risked testing the water any deeper since then.

One of the main reasons for that, though, is that space is so frustratingly massive. Voyager 1 is the fastest manmade thing ever, but 17 kilometres per second is a piffling fraction of the speed of light. Even getting to one of our nearest neighbours, Mars, would take six to eight months using conventional spaceship engines. Ideas like warp drives are still theoretical, and unlikely to be seen within our lifetimes. However, it might be possible to cut that trip to Mars down to as few as three months using a form of fusion fuel -- "dilithium crystals". Yep, just like Star Trek.



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The Really BIG Question: What is Reality?

New Scientist - Special Issue

(Image: Carol & Mike Werner/Visuals Unlimited/Getty)

WHEN you woke up this morning, you found the world largely as you left it. You were still you; the room in which you awoke was the same one you went to sleep in. The outside world had not been rearranged. History was unchanged and the future remained unknowable. In other words, you woke up to reality. But what is reality?

The more we probe it, the harder it becomes to comprehend. In the eight articles on this page we take a tour of our fundamental understanding of the world around us, starting with an attempt to define reality and ending with the idea that whatever reality is, it isn’t what it seems. Hold on to your hats.



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Immortality Through a Plastic Brain?

io9 - September 14, 2012 by George Dvorsky

We may never be able to freeze you at the moment of death and then reanimate you. But the good news is, there may be another way to keep your brain viable. A group of scientists have come up with a process called "chemical fixation and plastic embedding" — which essentially turns your brain into a hunk of exquisitely preserved plastic.

Here's how you can become immortal, by sealing your brain in amber.

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So, Time Really Does Go Forward?

The Economist - September 1, 2012

TIME seems to flow inexorably in one direction. Superficially, that is because things deteriorate with age—and this, in turn, is because there are innumerably fewer ways to arrange particles in an orderly fashion than in a jumbled mess. Any change in an existing arrangement is therefore likely to increase its disorder.

Dig a little deeper, though, and time’s arrow becomes mysterious. A particle cannot, by itself, become disordered, so when you examine its behaviour in isolation the past and the future are hard to distinguish. If you film its movement and then give the film to someone else, he will not be able to work out just from the particle’s behaviour which way to run the film through the projector. Essentially, the two ways of doing so are symmetrical. Or so physicists used to think until hints to the contrary emerged in the 1960s. Now a group of researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, near Stanford University in California, have found the first physical evidence that backs those indications up.

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Reality is liberating (Lawrence Krauss)

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