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Yes you heard it right. Physicists have just made what they say is the first ever device that's completely capable of producing particles that act as if they have negative mass. This particular device produces a peculiar particle that's half-light/half-matter, and as if that doesn’t sound cool enough, it might also be the foundation for a completely new kind of laser that could function on far less energy than present technologies. This forms on new theoretical work on the behavior of something called a polariton, which seems to act as if it has negative mass – a mind-bending property that perceives objects move towards the force pushing it, instead of being pushed away. Now physicists from the University of Rochester have created a device that allows them to actually create these polaritons at room temperature. They do this by manipulating captured photons and combine them with a kind of quasi-particle called an exciton to make something half-light/half-matter that some scien...

Cosmos” is returning to the National Geographic Channel and Fox . The networks have ordered a second season of the science documentary television series, which is a follow-up to the 1980s series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” with Carl Sagan. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and host of the Emmy Award-nominated “Star Talk,” returns as host of the series, scheduled to premiere globally in Spring 2019. The announcement was made at the Television Critics Association winter press tour on Saturday. The series hails from executive producer, writer, and director Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and one of the writers on the original 1980s series. She and Steven Soter, another writer from the original show, won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming in 2014 for the show’s first season. Seth MacFarlane, Brannon Braga, and Jason Clark also serve as executive producers. It will be produced by Cosmos Studios, the Ithaca, NY-based company Druyan co-founded in 2000, and Fuzzy Door...

The LIGO discovery, the finding of a merger of 30-solar-mass black holes made astronomers question just how common black holes of such enormous sizes are and the frequency of their mergers. Astronomers of the University of California, Irvine led by UCI chair and James Bullock , professor of physics and astronomy conducted this research .   An artist’s conception shows two black holes in the process of merging. (LIGO / Caltech / MIT Illustration) This research was focused on a cosmic inventory to calculate and categorize stellar-remnant black holes and found that it is highly probable that tens of millions black holes exist in the Milky Way. It is a number far higher than previously expected. James Bullock who is also co-author of the research paper printed in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society said the following about the discovery: “We think we’re shown that there are as many as 100 million black holes in our galaxy.” UCI’s celestial census began a bit over...

Possibly we’d never run out of the diverse ways to learn more about this ubiquitous and tremendously enigmatic module; light. Discoveries are still being made. It was only in 2015 that scientists photographed light behaving both as a particle and a wave. In 1992, light was discovered to have orbital angular momentum.  (Credit: Capasso Lab/Harvard SEAS) This angular momentum hinge on the shape of its wave-front instead of its orientation. Researchers at Harvard, with a recent development, can now engender new and more complex states of light. The method involves polarization to generate different structures, like swirling vortices, spirals, and corkscrews, not only helping further explore light's properties but also has potential practical implications, such as high-powered imaging. This system, with a meta-surface, uses this along with spin angular momentum, also known as circular polarization. The meta-surface could help shape optical tweezers to manipulate objects at molecular ...

Scientists have been dubious about the legitimacy of the third law of thermodynamics for long. Walther Nernst, between 1906 and 1912, developed the third law of thermodynamics, which states that:  The entropy of any pure substance in thermodynamic equilibrium approaches zero as the temperature approaches zero (Kelvin), or conversely, the temperature (Kelvin) of any pure substance in thermodynamic equilibrium approaches zero when the entropy approaches zero. But this law has now been proven to be valid with a recent development made by researchers at the University College London (UCL) by finding the maximum cooling speed. The speed of cooling is not universal, it depends on the speed of sound in the environment and how quickly energy can be injected in it. They demonstrated that absolute zero cannot be reached, in a finite number of steps, in a system where entropy cannot reach zero. Lluis Masanes, member research team, states “We show that you can’t actually cool a system to abso...

The Properties of Expanding Universes, Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis, has been published online for the first time and is free to read. However, the thesis, submitted in 1966, may not be a stroll in the park for most. This was Hawking's second degree, after his first-class bachelors degree in physics at Oxford. It can now be downloaded from the University of Cambridge's open access repository, Apollo. Penned as a 24-year-old Cambridge postgraduate student, Hawking explores "some implications and consequences of the expansion of the universe" in the academic work. He rules out that galaxies could form through the growth of initially small perturbations. After he was awarded his PhD, Hawking became a research fellow at Cambridge, and then later became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1979 to 2009. He became widely known following his scientific books aimed at a general audience. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time has remained the most popular book on the Sun...

Just 2 years, CERN unconfined the data from its impressive Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments onto an online accessible portal called the Open Data portal. It was an extraordinary action, letting those who don't have access to a particle accelerator use data from the LHC's experiments. It's not totally up-to-date. There's a three-year restriction on results, so, normally speaking, the most recent data uploaded on this online portal is from the year 2014. This was the first time outcomes of any particle collider experiment have been made accessible to the public, and now it has led to another discovery. About a week ago, a group of researchers from MIT published an article in Physical Review Letters that used data from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), to clarify a feature within high-energy particle collisions. Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is one of the LHC's main detectors. When protons hit at very high speeds, they discharge jets of quarks and gluons. The MIT ...

An ancient natural nuclear reactor that was churning away nearly 2 billion years ago sounds like a made-up myth. Perhaps it's because the word reactor suggests a manmade structure. Instead, the reactor is an area of natural uranium inside the Earth's crust, detected in Okla, Gabon. Uranium is naturally radioactive, and the settings in this rocky area happened to be just accurate to do some nuclear reactions.  The natural reactor must have annoyed nuclear scientists: The first nuclear reactor to provide electricity was build up in 1951, and this only made a small amount of energy. The pile of rock in the ground in Okla, instead, had generated nuclear power around 2 billion years ago! Oklo: Ancient African Nuclear Reactors It was discovered in  1972 , when some French scientists took uranium ore from the mine in Gabon to test its uranium content. Typically, uranium ore is made up of three types (isotopes) of uranium, each one with a different number of neutrons: U...

The cosmos may have existed always with no beginning, according to a new quantum model that relates quantum correction terms to match Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This theory may also cover for dark matter and dark energy, solving numerous problems at once. The generally acknowledged age of the cosmos, as projected by general relativity, is almost 13.8 billion years. In the start, everything in existence is considered to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or known as singularity. Only after this phase it started to inflate in a “Big Bang”, which is considered as official beginning of the universe. Even though the Big Bang singularity ascends directly and inevitably from the mathematics of general relativity, some researchers see it as problematical since the math can describe only what occurred directly after—not at or before—the singularity. “The Big Bang singularity is one of the biggest problem of general relativity as the laws of physics seem to break down ...

Here are some truly amazing science facts that you probably didn’t learn at school. Watch the video below:

What exactly is consciousness and how it is generated? How and why it exists and what’s the ultimate cause of consciousness? These are some major question that scientists are looking for their answers. In today’s world the mystery of consciousness is a challenge for physicists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists.  There are few theories that try to explain the consciousness. One of the most accepted theory is materialism. This theory says that consciousness is generated by matter i.e. by the firing of neurons inside the brain. The second theory is mind-body duality. This is probably more often known as religion or spirituality. Here, consciousness is distinct from matter. It is a part of alternative characteristic of the individual, which in religious expression we might call the soul. Then there’s a third option which is gaining ground in some scientific society, Panpsychism . According to this theory, the entire universe is occupied by consciousness . Panpsychism is curr...

A group of researchers has discovered proof for a strange particle that, strangely, is also its own antiparticle. It was first proposed 80 years ago but now existence of it might be a reality. The results, published in the journal Science , were led by researchers from Stanford University in California and the University of California. The notion of a particle having its own antiparticle was first introduced in 1937 when Italian physicist Ettore Majorana (who strangely disappeared in 1938) first suggested the theory.  He said that inside the class of fermions, which comprise protons, electrons, and neutrons, some particles must have their own antiparticles, which became known as Majorana particles. An antiparticle is a particle that has the same mass as the normal particle, but a reverse electric or magnetic property. For instance, the electron’s antiparticle is the positron. If the two come across each other, they annihilate each other. In this study, the group of physicists st...

Just last year, a Long March 2D rocket lift off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert transporting a satellite called Micius , named after an ancient Chinese logician from 391 B.C. Micius is in a Sun-synchronous orbit so that it travels over the exact same point on Earth at the same time each day. Micius is very important for quantum experiments. It has a highly sensitive receiver that can detect the quantum states of single photons sent from the ground. It is very helpful in experimenting entanglement, cryptography, and teleportation. Few days ago Micius team publicized the results of its first experiments. They used Micius to successfully teleport the first object from the ground to orbit. Researchers were able to teleport a proton from Earth to the orbit. You can read about the whole experiment and how it was done here . This is the first time that any object has been teleported from Earth to orbit, and it also smashes the record for the longest distance for...