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The nature of dark energy is one of the most important unsolved problems in all of science. But what, exactly, is dark energy, and why do we even believe that it exists? Step back a minute and consider a more familiar experience: what happens when you toss a ball straight up into the air? It gradually slows down as gravity tugs on it, finally stopping in mid-air and falling back to the ground. Of course, if you threw the ball hard enough (about 25,000 miles per hour) it would actually escape from the Earth entirely and shoot into space, never...

Certain types of supernovae, or exploding stars, are more diverse than previously thought, a University of Arizona-led team of astronomers has discovered. The results, reported in two papers published in the Astrophysical Journal, have implications for big cosmological questions, such as how fast the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang. Most importantly, the findings hint at the possibility that the acceleration of the expansion of the universe might not be quite as fast as textbooks say. The team, led by UA astronomer Peter A. Milne, discovered that type Ia supernovae, which have been considered so uniform that cosmologists...

NASA has published a video that shows the far side of the moon as never seen before.

Nationwide ran two ads during the Super Bowl this year, but it was one that told the story of dead children (watch it below) that really got people talking. So much so that Nationwide has landed itself the ominous title of the most-mentioned advertiser on social media during Super Bowl XLIX, according to quickfire analysis from digital marketing technology company Amobee Brand Intelligence across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The ad, which featured a boy talking about all the life achievements he missed out on because he died in an accident, was an attempt to raise awareness about the fact that...

Based on the latest evidence and theories our galaxy could be a huge wormhole (or space-time tunnel, have you seen the movie "Interstellar?") and, if that were true, it would be "stable and navigable." This is the hypothesis put forward in a study published in Annals of Physics and conducted with the participation of SISSA in Trieste. The paper, the result of a collaboration between Indian, Italian and North American researchers, prompts scientists to re-think dark matter. "If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the...

..... ...Today, they are all happy that the Caliphate is about to return, as if the days of the Caliphate were good. Who are you kidding? The days of the Caliphate were all dark times, from day one to the Ottoman Caliphate... .....

The Chameleon in the Vacuum Chamber A new proposal for an experiment that could test the presence of a fifth force with unprecedented precision. It still amazes me that everything I see is made up of only some few dozen particles and four interactions. For all we know. But maybe this isn’t all there is? Physicists have been speculating for a while now that our universe needs a fifth fundamental force, one responsible for the phenomenon of dark energy, to maintain the observed expansion rate. Although this idea has been around for more than a decade, it has turned...

Physicists Resurrect an Old, ‘Strange’ Dark Matter Theory Written by Michael Byrne Editor November 5, 2014 // 09:15 AM EST Dark matter might not be nearly as exotic as most theories about the stuff suggest. Instead, it could be macroscopic clumps of material formed from common particles already found within the Standard Model of particle physics. This argument comes courtesy of physicists at Case Western University, as presented in a new paper posted to the arXiv pre-print server. Dark matter is usually thought of in terms of exotic, so-far undiscovered particles. The leading candidates are known as weakly interacting massive particles,...

The fall-out from a grid-down scenario would be absolutely devastating, as noted by a spokesman for the Center for Security Policy who recently responded to the potential for EMP capable weapons being deployed over the United States: And experts forecast if such an attack were a success, it effectively could throw the U.S. back into an age of agriculture. “Within a year of that attack, nine out of 10 Americans would be dead, because we can’t support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity,” said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security...

ANN ARBOR—Moonless nights outside the Cerro Tololo astronomical observatory in Chile are so dark that when you look down, you can't see your feet. "You can't see your hands," said David Gerdes, physics professor at the University of Michigan. "But you can hold them up to the sky and see a hand-shaped hole with no stars in it. It's really incredible." From this site in the Andes over the next five years, an international team will map one-eighth of the sky in unprecedented detail—aiming to make a time lapse of the past 8 billion years of a slice of the...

Power grid vulnerabilities are finally garnering some attention by government officials. An electrical grid joint drill simulation is being planned in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Thousands of utility workers, FBI agents, anti-terrorism experts, governmental agencies, and more than 150 private businesses are involved in the November power grid drill. The SHIELD Act, which is stalled in Congress, is the first serious piece of legislation in many years to attempt to address the vulnerabilities of the power grid in.

One physicist says he likes this theory because of “its simplicity, uniqueness and the fact that it can be tested.”Theoretical physicists at Vanderbilt University contend that a simply theory may explain mysterious dark matter. They propose that most of the matter in the universe may be constructed of particles that have an abnormal, donut-shaped electromagnetic field known as an anapole. According to a news release from Vanderbilt University, Professor Robert Scherrer and post-doctoral fellow Chiu Man Ho carried out an in-depth analysis to determine the validity of this theory. Scherrer points out that he likes this theory because of “its...

Potential Dark Matter Discovery a Win for Space Station Science April 04, 2013; 7:56 AM If nature is kind, the first detection of dark matter might be credited to the International Space Station soon. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment hangs on the side of the International Space Station, July 12, 2011. CREDIT: NASAToday (April 3), researchers announced the first science results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a $2 billion cosmic-ray particle detector mounted on the exterior of the football-field-size International Space Station. The instrument has observed a striking pattern of antimatter particles called positrons that may turn out to...

Go behind the scenes in the white house kitchen and see the brewing of President Obama's homemade beer.

In perhaps the least self-aware review of the politics of "The Dark Knight Rises" yet, Steven Zeitchik of the Los Angeles Times is befuddled at the idea that left-wing thought could ever be portrayed negatively. First, he admits his own incompetence: [M]ore politics doesn't mean your movie's message is more consistent or decipherable. Or perhaps the politics of "The Dark Knight Rises" is perfectly consistent and decipherable … and Zeitchik just doesn’t get it. In the next few lines, he shows that he has no clue what he’s talking about: Contradictions abound in "The Dark Knight Rises."

Two years ago several of my Sci Am colleagues and I had an intense email exchange over a period of weeks, trying to figure out what to make of a new paper by string theorist Erik Verlinde. I don’t think I’ve ever been so flummoxed by physicists’ reactions to a paper. Mathematically it could hardly have been simpler—the level of middle-school algebra for the most part. Logically and physically, it was a head-hurter. I couldn’t decide whether it was profound or trite. The theorists we consulted said they couldn’t follow it, which we took as a polite way of saying...

Al-Qaeda’s main Web forums have been offline for the past 11 days in what experts say is the longest sustained outage of the sites since they began operating eight years ago. No one has publicly claimed responsibility for disabling the sites, but the breadth and the duration of the outages have prompted some experts to conclude the forums have been taken down in a cyberattack — launched perhaps by a government, government-backed organization or hacking group. The first Web site, Shumukh al-Islam, a primary source for al-Qaeda videos and messages, went down on March 22, and since then four others...

Imagine a Republican president regularly invoking the wisdom of a multibillionaire businessman who had profited off companies with questionable business practices, and who law-enforcement officials had recently asked to provide information about his own company’s questionable practices. No question about it: Democrats and the media would be having a field day. So why do we hear so little about the dark side of Warren Buffett? True, the double standard involving Buffett’s business record is longstanding. But now President Obama is using him as a central prop in his class-warfare strategy for winning a second term. Getting a free pass from...

Support for Dark Energy by Paul Gilster on May 20, 2011 The far future may be a lonely place, at least in extragalactic terms. Scientists studying gravity’s interactions with so-called dark energy — thought to be the cause of the universe’s accelerating expansion — can work out a scenario in which gravity dominated in the early universe. But somewhere around eight billion years after the Big Bang, the continuing expansion and consequent dilution of matter caused gravity to fall behind dark energy in its effects. We’re left with what we see today, a universe whose expansion will one day...

Is an Adjacent Universe Causing the Dark Flow of Hundred of Millions of Stars at the Edge of the Observable Universe? Or, Might It Be Something ElseBack in the Middle Ages, maps showed terrifying images of sea dragons at the boundaries of the known world. Today, scientists have observed strange new motion at the very limits of the known universe -- kind of where you'd expect to find new things, but they still didn't expect this. A huge swathe of galactic clusters seem to be heading to a cosmic hotspot and nobody knows why. The unexplained motion has hundreds of...