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Category: physics

In June, a team of programmers will release a ground-breaking new video game called No Man’s Sky, which uses artificial intelligence and procedural generation to self-create an entire cosmos full of planets. Running off 600,000 lines of code, the game creates an artificial galaxy populated by 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets that you can travel to and explore.

Though this artificial universe is realistic down to the dimensions of a blade of grass, faster than light-speed travel is available in order for players to bridge the unfathomable distances between stars.

Chief architect Sean Murray says No Man’s Sky is different than most games because the landscapes and distances aren’t faked. While most space-based games utilize a skybox that simply rotates between different modalities, No Man’s Sky is virtually limitless and employs real physics.

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Recent advances in lasers suggest that we may see rockets propelled by light earlier than we had imagined. NASA scientist Philip Lubin and his team are working on a system that would use Earth-based lasers to allow space travel to far-away places in just a fraction of the time needed with current technology.

photonic_propulsion

Using earth based lasers to push along a spacecraft instead of on board hydrocarbon-based fuel could dramatically reduce travel time to Mars, within our lifetime. Currently, it takes five months for a space craft to reach Mars. But, with photonic propulsion, it is likely that small crafts filled with experiments will reach Mars in just 3 days. Large spaceships with astronauts and life support systems will take only one month, which is about 20% of the duration of a current trip.

What’s next? Lubin believes that we may be able to send small crafts with scientific experiments to exoplanets as fast as 5% light speed in, perhaps, 30 years. Eventually, he claims that the technology will carry humans at speeds up to 20% light speed.

Read about it here.

Antimatter propulsion is a lot closer than most aerospace engineers would ever imagine and these guys looking for cash for the next phase of their own research deserve kudos for trying to take this to the next level.

Dreams of antimatter space propulsion are closer to reality than most rocket scientists could ever imagine, says former Fermilab physicist Gerald Jackson. In fact, if money were no object, he says an antimatter-driven spacecraft prototype could be tested within a decade.

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Astronomers have found an extraordinary trail of gas greater than 300,000 light years across originating from a nearby galaxy called NGC 4569, according to a report in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The tail is comprised of hydrogen gas, the material new stars are born from, and is five times longer than the galaxy itself.

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Meet the opponents of BMIs & their report.

*This article only represents a very small fraction of the research regarding the dangers associated with these devices. We encourage you to further your own research, and just wanted to provide a base to let you know that it’s something more of us need to pay attention to.

Did you know that a child’s brain absorbs much more radiation than that of an adult?

Dr. Martin Blank, Ph.D., from the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Colombia University, has joined a group of scientists from around the world who are making an international appeal to the United Nations regarding the dangers associated with the use of various electromagnetic emitting devices, like cells phones and WiFi.

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China has proposals for gravitational wave observatories drafted, but will the government approve them? How will they affect the country’s rank in space research?

The scientists at LIGO may be celebrating, but they’re about to have some stiff competition.

The People’s Republic of China now has three projects lined up to investigate gravitational waves as reported by the state media yesterday. These projects were decided upon just days after US scientists confirmed Einstein’s prediction.

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Astrophysicists famously proved Einstein’s theory on the existence of gravitational waves last week. Here’s the less covered part of it all: It might, down the line, bring us closer to moving through time.

A now-famous team of astrophysicists shocked the world Thursday after recording the gravitational waves of two black holes slamming into each other 1.3 billion light-years away.

This detection supports Einstein’s general theory of relativity in a way that revolutionizes scientific understanding of how space and time behave in extreme environments, and astrophysics will never be the same.

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You know what they say about rules…

If you thought regular black holes were about as weird and mysterious as space gets, think again, because for the first time, physicists have successfully simulated what would happen to black holes in a five-dimensional world, and the way they behave could threaten our fundamental understanding of how the Universe works.

The simulation has suggested that if our Universe is made up of five or more dimensions — something that scientists have struggled to confirm or disprove — Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the foundation of modern physics, would be wrong.

In other words, five-dimensional black holes would contain gravity so intense, the laws of physics as we know them would fall apart.

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We don’t live in a world that’s pinning the survival of humanity of Matthew McConaughey’s shoulders, but if it turns out the plot of the 2014 film Interstellar is true, then we live in a world with at least five dimensions. And that would mean that a ring-shaped black hole would, as scientists recently demonstrated, “break down” Einstein’s general theory of relativity. (And to think, the man was just coming off a phenomenal week.)

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from the UK simulated a black hole in a “5-D” universe shaped like a thin ring (which were first posited by theoretical physicists in 2002). In this universe, the black hole would bulge strangely, with stringy connections that become thinner as time passes. Eventually, those strings pinch off like budding bacteria or water drops off a stream and form miniature black holes of their own.

This is wicked weird stuff, but we haven’t even touched on the most bizarre part. A black hole like this leads to what physicists call a “naked singularity,” where the equations that support general relativity — a foundational block of modern physics — stop making sense.

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