In science news this week…
The Guardian newspaper reported on the likely fate of the Sun in a few billion years’ time. Amazing that the Sun is losing mass at the rate of 4 billion kilograms per second (due to its nuclear reactions and the wonder of \(E=mc^2\)) and yet it will still last this long. Must be quite big!
The Sun is overwhelmingly made of plasma (as we discussed in a previous post). Recreating such plasmas on Earth is important in the field of energy generation – if we can get nuclear fusion to work as a power source, it would be a gamechanger. Culham Centre for Fusion Energy among others are trying to do just that. Here’s a video of one of their plasmas. It involves a current of 1.2 million amps!
Also in our post on solids, liquids and gases, we mentioned dark matter and dark energy. Some physicists seem to think that emergent gravity could remove the need for it!
Last time we pointed you to a Sixty Symbols video, which discussed the messiness of science, and how The Scientific Method is not always the scientific method! That video referenced a paper by Sean Carroll. Here it is.
What is a crystal? If you’ve never met a formal definition of the word crystal, you might find this a weird question. After all everyone knows what a crystal is, right? Well, in a semi-technical sense, a crystal is a solid whose constituents periodically repeat in space. Physicists at Yale have observed a substance behaving as a ‘time crystal‘, a crystal that also repeats in time! And they did it using a substance commonly found in children’s home chemistry kits!
And for a bit of fun, staying on the theme of time, what DramaticChemist on Reddit Chemistry calls ‘Hypnotic Multi-oscillating clock reactions’.