Water is a fascinating substance. It readily manifests on Earth in the three most common states of matter: solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (water vapor). The physicists and chemists who study the various states of matter plot them on a chart known as a phase diagram. A generic one is shown below. On the Y-axis is pressure, and on the X-axis is temperature. The diagram shows what we all know intuitively to be true:…
In 2022, the physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the universe works. Many look at those experiments and conclude that they challenge “locality” — the intuition that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact. And indeed, a mysterious connection between distant particles would be one way to explain these experimental results. Others instead think the experiments challenge “realism”…
Ghost hunting in locations like castles, stately homes and prison has become a leisure activity for the thousands of members of the public who attend paranormal events each week, but what about hunting down spirits in a graveyard, an ancient burial ground or even a concentration camp? Auschwitz is probably the most infamous of all concentration and extermination camps, it was situated in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. In 1979 it was named a…
The U.K.’s Ministry of Defence will publish secret UFO reports for the first time. From the early 1950s until 2009, a department in the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) documented and investigated reports of UFOs. Now, more than a decade after the program ended, many of those formerly classified files about UFO sightings will be made available to the public for the first time. Previously, some MoD files about UFOs had been published online at the…
The hot new movie of the moment is “Cocaine Bear,” a comedy horror film loosely based on the true story of a black bear that ingested millions of dollars of cocaine lost by drug smugglers. The hot new Siberian permafrost discovery of the moment is also about a bear – it is the true story of a mummified brown bear that lived 3500 years ago and is the first complete frozen bear carcass found of…
