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A Particle Physics Experiment May Have Directly Observed Dark Energy

About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed something very interesting about the Universe. The fact that it was in a state of expansion had been known since the 1920s, thanks to the observation of Edwin Hubble. But thanks to the observations astronomers were making with the space observatory that bore his name (the Hubble Space Telescope), they began to notice how the rate of cosmic expansion was getting faster! This has led to the theory that the Universe is filled with an invisible and mysterious force, known as Dark Energy (DE). Decades after it was proposed, scientists are still trying to…

NASA’s New $10 Billion Webb Space Telescope Will Reveal the Supermassive Black Hole at the Heart of the Milky Way

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab Webb will tackle the challenge of the supermassive black hole’s puzzling flares, which have proved both intriguing and frustrating for astronomers. In its first year of operations, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will join forces with a global collaborative effort to create an image of the area directly surrounding the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is famous for its first image of the “shadow” of the black hole at the core of galaxy M87, and…

How Does Our Brain Navigates Cities? Choosing the “Pointiest” Path, Not the Shortest

We seem to be wired to calculate not the shortest path but the “pointiest” one, facing us toward our destination as much as possible. Everyone knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. However, when you’re walking along city streets, a straight line may not be possible. How do you decide which way to go? A new MIT study suggests that our brains are actually not optimized to calculate the so-called “shortest path” when navigating on foot. Based on a dataset of more than 14,000 people going about their daily lives, the MIT team found that instead,…

When a Massive Wildfire Tears Through a Landscape, What Happens to the Wildlife?

Lead Image: Black-tailed deer appear on a wildlife camera on July 24, 2018, several days before flames from the Mendocino Complex Fire torched this landscape, burning more than half of the University of California’s Hopland Research and Extension Center. Credit: Brashares Lab, UC Berkeley After massive California wildfire, deer returned home while trees were “still smouldering.” While many animals have adapted to live with wildfires of the past — which were smaller, more frequent and kept ecosystems in balance across the West — it’s unclear to scientists how animals are coping with today’s unprecedented megafires. More than a century of…