Human observation of dark energy may shorten the life span of the universe. Could humanity's observation of dark energy have shortened the life span of the universe?
The answer is "yes" according to the author of a new scientific paper that has recently come to light. Featured in the latest edition of New Scientist magazine, the subscriber-only story, "Has observing the universe hastened its end? ", discusses the paper and its claims. Now, before I go further, I must point out that this work has not yet appeared in any peer-reviewed journal. It has been submitted to Physical Review Letters, and a pre-print can be found on arXiv.org. Their official paper, titled "The Late Time Behavior of False Vacuum Decay: Possible Implications for Cosmology and Metastable Inflating States," is far from grandiose. IXPLORA - Mobile Phone News and General Tech News and Discussion. The Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time. What happens if you give an elephant LSD?
On Friday August 3, 1962, a group of Oklahoma City researchers decided to find out. Warren Thomas, Director of the City Zoo, fired a cartridge-syringe containing 297 milligrams of LSD into Tusko the Elephant's rump. With Thomas were two scientific colleagues from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce. 297 milligrams is a lot of LSD — about 3000 times the level of a typical human dose. Thomas, West, and Pierce later explained that the experiment was designed to find out if LSD would induce musth in an elephant — musth being a kind of temporary madness male elephants sometimes experience during which they become highly aggressive and secrete a sticky fluid from their temporal glands. Whatever the reason for the experiment, it almost immediately went awry.
In the years that followed controversy lingered over whether it was the LSD that killed Tusko, or the drugs used to revive him. Dr. Dr. Black Hole Caught Eating a Star, Gamma-Ray Flash Hints. A huge "belch" of radiation from a supermassive black hole indicates that the cosmic monster recently devoured a star, scientists say.
Earlier this year astronomers spied a burst of high-energy gamma rays emanating from the center of a dwarf galaxy 3.8 billion light-years away. The odd flash, dubbed Sw 1644+57, is one is the brightest and longest gamma ray bursts (GRBs) yet seen. In visible light and infrared wavelengths, the burst is as bright as a hundred billion suns. (Related: "Ultrabright Gamma-ray Burst 'Blinded' NASA Telescope. ") Branson's 'flying' sub to plumb ocean depths. Credit: Virgin Oceanic NEWPORT BEACH: British billionaire Richard Branson unveiled plans to pilot a ‘flying’ mini-submarine to the deepest points in each of the world’s five oceans for the first time.
The single-seater Virgin Oceanic craft will start with the deepest of them all in the western Pacific later this year, to carry out surveying, mapping and sampling in the region. Most of the oceans’ trenches have only been explored with robotic vehicles, if at all. “More men have been to the Moon than have been down further than 20,000 feet,” said Branson, announcing the Jules Verne-style project at Newport Harbour, south of Los Angeles. “With space long ago reached by man, and commercial spaceflight tantaliSingly close, the last great challenge for humans is to reach and explore the depths of our planet’s oceans,” he said.
First trip to Mariana Trench Leaks mean certain death. Muon. The muon is an unstable subatomic particle with a mean lifetime of 2.2 µs.
Among all known subatomic particles, only the neutron and some atomic nuclei have a longer decay lifetime; others decay significantly faster. The decay of the muon (as well as of the neutron, the longest-lived unstable baryon), is mediated by the weak interaction exclusively. Muon decay always produces at least three particles, which must include an electron of the same charge as the muon and two neutrinos of different types.
Like all elementary particles, the muon has a corresponding antiparticle of opposite charge (+1) but equal mass and spin: the antimuon (also called a positive muon). Muons are denoted by μ− and antimuons by μ+. Einstein Theories Confirmed by NASA Gravity Probe. Two key predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity have been confirmed by NASA's Gravity Probe B mission, scientists announced this week.
"We've completed this landmark experiment testing Einstein's universe, and Einstein survives," principal investigator Francis Everitt, of Stanford University in California, said during a press briefing. (Also see "Einstein's Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale. ") Launched in 2004, the Gravity Probe B mission used four ultraprecise gyroscopes—devices used to measure orientation—housed in a satellite to measure two aspects of Einstein's theory about gravity.
The first is the geodetic effect, which is the warping of space and time—or spacetime—around a gravitational body, such as a planet. One common way to visualize the geodetic effect is to think of Earth as a bowling ball and spacetime as a trampoline. Doing What Einstein Thought Impossible The change is so small, in fact, that Einstein didn't think measuring it was even possible. Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story' A belief that heaven or an afterlife awaits us is a "fairy story" for people afraid of death, Stephen Hawking has said.
In a dismissal that underlines his firm rejection of religious comforts, Britain's most eminent scientist said there was nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time. Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death, human purpose and our chance existence in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today. The incurable illness was expected to kill Hawking within a few years of its symptoms arising, an outlook that turned the young scientist to Wagner, but ultimately led him to enjoy life more, he has said, despite the cloud hanging over his future. "I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. A Beautiful Mind? 12-Year-Old Boy Genius Sets Out to Disprove Big Bang.
At 12-years-old, Jacob Barnett is a genius.
He’s already in college, his IQ is higher than Einstein’s, and for fun he’s working on an expanded version of that man’s theory of relativity. So far, the signs are good. Professors are astounded. So what else does a boy genius with vast brilliance do in his free time? Experimental Physics and The Limits Of Human Knowledge - We Are Crossing the Boundary Between Knowledge and Belief. HowStuffWorks - Learn How Everything Works! Densest Matter Created in Big-Bang Machine.