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Category: physics

What. The. Heck. Did you see that? Simone Biles appears to defy the laws of physics with this epic tumbling pass from the 2019 US Gymnastics Championships. It’s called a triple-double. That means she rotates around an axis going through her hips twice while at the same time rotating about an axis going from head to toe THREE times. Yes, it’s difficult—but it doesn’t defy physics, it uses physics.

https://twitter.com/NBCSports/status/1160714101288574976

Let’s go over the three key parts of this move. You can follow the physics, but I don’t recommend trying this triple-double in your backyard.

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Physicists Sergio Ferrara, Dan Freedman, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen will split a $3 million Breakthrough Prize for their theory of supergravity, which drives much of today’s physics research toward our understanding of the universe.

The Breakthrough Prize is an annual award to recognize groundbreaking science, funded by Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner. Though Breakthrough Prizes are awarded annually, “special” Breakthrough Prizes can be awarded any time and need not honor recent work. In fact, the researchers behind today’s award thought they’d missed the chance to win it.

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The human brain contains a little over 80-odd billion neurons, each joining with other cells to create trillions of connections called synapses.

The numbers are mind-boggling, but the way each individual nerve cell contributes to the brain’s functions is still an area of contention.

In fact, a study published in 2017 has overturned a 100-year-old assumption on what exactly makes a neuron ‘fire’, posing new mechanisms behind certain neurological disorders.

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Imagine trying to film an event that was over and done within a mere 125 trillionths of a second. It’s something that molecular physicists have long been dreaming of, and at last it seems they’ve achieved their goal.

Using precisely tuned pulses of laser light, an international team of scientists from four different institutions has managed to film the ultrafast rotation of a molecule.

“We recorded a high-resolution molecular movie of the ultrafast rotation of carbonyl sulphide as a pilot project,” said molecular physicist Evangelos Karamatskos from DESY, Germany’s largest accelerator centre.

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Atish Dabholkar, a theoretical physicist from India, has been appointed as the new director of Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy.

He is currently the head of ICTP’s high energy, cosmology and astroparticle physics section. He joined the centre in 2014 on secondment from Sorbonne Université and the National Center for Scientific Research, where he has been a research director since 2007. Mr. Dabholkar will take up his duties as ICTP director with the rank of Assistant Director General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He will succeed Fernando Quevedo, who has led the centre since 2009.

“It’s an honour and a great responsibility to be chosen as ICTP’s next director. ICTP is a one-of-a-kind institution with a very high level of research and a unique global mission for international cooperation through science. It was envisioned as an international hub for excellence in science and as an anchor to build scientific capacity and a culture of science around the globe. This vision remains valid today even after five decades, but needs to be implemented keeping in mind changing realities and priorities,” he said in a statement.

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The reusability is a key aspect, as Musk has said each engine needs to be capable of flying up to 1,000 times to support the ambitious operations of Starship. That’s a major challenge; the most re-used engines in space exploration history were the main engines on each Space Shuttle, which flew up to only a few dozen times each. “It’s quite ambitious,” says Dodd. “I don’t know if 1,000 flights is necessarily going to be achievable in the near future. If it lives up to its potential, maybe 1,000 is within the realm of possibility one day.”

SpaceX’s existing engine is called Merlin, which is used on its operational Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, but Raptor heralds a significant improvement. One is that it has double the thrust of its predecessor thanks to a much higher pressure, 380,000 pounds of thrust at sea level versus 190,000 pounds, despite being a similar size.

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The spinning ball of plasma that is our Sun produces a spinning magnetic field too, and where that magnetic field weakens, solar winds can escape.

Now scientists have been able to recreate those same effects in a lab for the first time, meaning we can study the bizarre science around our star at close quarters, without a trip across the Solar System.

Knowing how this magnetic field and its associated plasma flows behave is crucial in improving our understanding of how and when solar storms might impact Earth, and potentially put our communications systems and infrastructure under severe strain.

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In about 100 years, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku believes we’ll explore the universe as pure consciousness — traveling at the speed of light, looking at asteroids, comets, meteors, and eventually the stars. “All of this within the laws of physics,” he says.

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Click on photo to start video.

If philosophers don’t try to mesh their long-held views with new scientific insights, then we have a problem. For instance, panpsychism may be due for an update: panprotopsychism, a view that says when fundamental “ingredients of reality” combine, they give rise to conscious experience — and that those fundamental ingredients are “quasimental.”

In this video, NASA’s own Dr. Susan Schneider, who specializes in astrobiology, explains further.

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