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The 39 most awe-inspiring scientific discoveries of the decade include the 'God particle,' the first image of a black hole, and the ability to edit the human genome

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black hole neutron star

In the last decade, scientists around the world pulled off impressive feats: They imaged a supermassive black hole for the first time, discovered new human ancestors, and launched probes to distant asteroids, comets, and moons.

Researchers also invented reusable rockets, sent two landers to explore Mars, and identified possibly habitable planets outside our solar system.

These and other accomplishments are improving scientists' understanding of our history, the planet, and the cosmos.

As 2020 — and a new decade — approaches, here's a look back at some of the most awe-inspiring scientific discoveries made during the last 10 years.

SEE ALSO: The most mind-boggling scientific discoveries of 2019

In March 2010, anthropologists discovered a tiny, lone finger bone in the Denisova cave in Siberia. They determined it belonged to previously undiscovered species of human ancestor.

Genetic analysis revealed that Denisovans (named after the cave in which they were found) were an enigmatic offshoot of Neanderthals.

Thus far, fossilized Denisovan remains have only been found in Siberia and Tibet. The species disappeared about 50,000 years ago but passed some of their genetic makeup to Homo sapiensDenisovan DNA can be found in the genes of modern humans across Asia and some Pacific islands; up to 5% of modern Papua New Guinea residents' DNA shows remnants of interbreeding with Denisovans. 

People in Tibet today also possess some Denisovan traits — and these traits appear to help Sherpas weather high altitudes.



Just after anthropologists discovered Denisovans, geneticists finished sequencing the entire Neanderthal genome.

Scientists discovered that both Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with modern humans extensively.



While 2010 was a watershed year for anthropology, 2011 was all about achievements in space. NASA sent a new rover to Mars named Curiosity.

Curiosity is the largest and most capable rover ever sent to Mars. It joined fellow rover Opportunity in searching the red planet for signs of water and clues about whether Mars was capable of supporting microbial lifeforms.



In November 2011, NASA announced that its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope had spotted its first potentially habitable planet, Kepler 22-b.

The Kepler mission was charged with finding and identifying Earth-like planets in our galaxy that existed within a star's "Goldilocks," or habitable, zone. Kepler 22-b is 600 light-years away.

Planets in habitable zones are capable of hosting liquid water, one of the requisites for being considered Earth-like.



Impressive achievements in space exploration continued into 2012. In November of that year, NASA's Voyager 1 probe left our solar system and crossed into interstellar space.

NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977. After flying by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space. It continues to collect data to this day.

In 2019, Voyager 1's successor, Voyager 2, also entered interstellar space. Both probes have been flying longer than any other spacecraft in history.

Voyager 2 has beamed back unprecedented data about previously unknown boundary layers at the far edge of our solar system— an area known as the heliopause. The discovery of these boundary layers suggests there are stages in the transition from our solar bubble to interstellar space that scientists did not previously know about.



In May 2012, Elon Musk's aerospace company, SpaceX, made history by sending the first-ever commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station (ISS).

SpaceX's groundbreaking spaceship was called Dragon.

Previously, only four governments — the United States, Russia, Japan, and the European Space Agency — had achieved this challenging technical feat.

Seven years later, SpaceX launched Dragon's successor, Crew Dragon, into orbit for the first time. Crew Dragon is designed to ferry astronauts to the ISS; its 2019 trip marked the first time that a commercial spaceship designed for humans had ever left Earth. 



Other scientific disciplines made incredible headway in 2012, too. Physicists reported the detection of a new type of particle called the Higgs Boson.

The Higgs Boson is nicknamed the "God particle" because it gives mass to all other fundamental particles in the universe that have mass, like electrons and protons. 

Scientists knew a particle akin to the Higgs Boson had to exist — otherwise nothing in the universe would have mass, and we wouldn't exist — but had failed to find evidence of such a particle until 2012.



The same year, the patent for utilizing CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology was approved.

Crispr-Cas9 technology enables researchers to edit parts of the genome by removing, adding, or altering sections of DNA. Since 2012, scientists have edited mosquito, mushroom, and lizard DNA, among others. In 2018, a Chinese scientist announced he had edited the genetic information of two human embryos.



In 2013, NASA astronomers observed plumes of water vapor being ejected from the frigid, icy surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa.

This discovery made Europa only the second known oceanic world in our solar system aside from Earth; NASA observed jets of water vapor spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus in 2005.

The presence of liquid water and ice make these two moons ideal places to search for life in our corner of the galaxy.

Since 2013, water has also been discovered on the dwarf-planet Pluto, a moon of Neptune called Triton, and multiple other moons of Jupiter and Saturn.



That year, NASA's Curiosity rover uncovered evidence that the red planet not only once held liquid water, but may also have been habitable.

In September 2012, NASA announced its Curiosity rover had identified gravel made by an ancient river in Mars' Gale Crater.

Then in March 2013, scientists found chemical ingredients for life — sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon — in powder that Curiosity had drilled from rock near the ancient streambed.

"A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment," Michael Meyer, who worked as the lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the time, said in a press release about the finding. "From what we know now, the answer is yes."

In the following years, evidence has mounted that the planet was once home to a vast ocean.

 



Since then, evidence has continued to mount that Mars still hosts liquid water today in at least one underground lake.

After three years of studying Mars, Italian scientists determined in July 2018 that it's possible the red planet has a 20-kilometer-wide lake of liquid water at its polar ice cap today.

"If these researchers are right, this is the first time we've found evidence of a large water body on Mars," Cassie Stuurman, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, told the Associated Press.

Other parts of Mars are too cold for water to stay liquid ⁠— unless it's deep underground.

In a March 2019 study, researchers suggested that seasonal flow patterns in Mars's crater walls could come from pressurized groundwater 750 meters below the surface, which travels upward through cracks in the ground.

 



In November, physicists discovered 28 strange particles called neutrinos buried deep under the Antarctic ice. These neutrinos, they concluded, had come from outside our solar system.

Researchers found the particles using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an array of sensors embedded in Antarctic ice. Neutrinos are nearly mass-less and unstoppable; they move at the speed of light and get discharged in the aftermath of exploding stars.

Scientists can use neutrinos to understand events happening in distant galaxies. In 2018, they found more of the particles in Antarctica, then traced them back to the source: a rapidly spinning black hole, millions of times the mass of the sun, that's gobbling up gas and dust.



Researchers also achieved a food industry milestone in 2013 when scientists successfully served the first-ever lab-grown hamburger.

The burger — which took two years and $325,000 to make — consists of 20,000 thin strips of cow muscle tissue that were grown in a Netherlands laboratory. 

Since 2013, the lab-grown meat industry has grown in popularity and dropped in price. In 2015, one of the researchers responsible for the first lab-grown burger, said the per-pound cost had dropped to $37

 



The European Space Agency got some time in the spotlight in 2014. In November, the agency's Rosetta space probe was able to land on a comet 372 million miles from Earth called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

It took Rosetta 10 years to reach and orbit the comet, then launch a lander down to the surface.

Rosetta's lander, Philae, took the first-ever surface images of a comet. 



In 2015, anthropologist Lee Berger announced that his team had discovered a new human ancestor species called Homo Naledi in South Africa.

Two spelunkers had accidentally stumbled across the Homo naledi fossils two years earlier, in a hidden cave 100 feet below the surface.

All told, the chamber contained 1,550 bones belonging to at least 15 individuals who all lived between 330,000 and 250,000 years ago.



2015 was also the year that scientists mapped the human epigenome for the first time.

The epigenome is made up of chemicals and proteins that can attach to DNA and modify its function — turning our genes on and off. 

An individual's lifestyle and environment —  factors like whether they smoke or what their diet looks like — can prompt sometimes deadly changes in their epigenome that can cause cancer.

Mapping the epigenome may help scientists understand how tumors develop and cancer spreads.



Humanity visited Pluto for the first time in 2015, when NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the dwarf planet.

New Horizons spent 15 minutes flying close to the dwarf planet and collecting as much information as possible. After that, it moved on for close encounter with Pluto's largest moon, Charon.



Another NASA spacecraft, Cassini, achieved new heights that same year. In September, astronomers announced that they had confirmed a liquid ocean exists under the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft found that Enceladus emits plumes of water into space following the probe's arrival in 2004. But in 2015, scientists confirmed that the source of these plumes was a giant saltwater ocean hidden beneath the moon's icy crust. 



Later that year, Space X launched and recovered the first-ever reusable rocket: the Falcon 9.

After the first-stage portion of the Falcon 9 launched was recovered, it was repurposed and re-launched in March 2017. 



In 2016, an artificial intelligence program from Google's DeepMind division named AlphaGo beat the world champion in four out of five matches of Go, a strategy game.

That wasn't the first time AI beat humans in a complex game.

In 2011, IBM's supercomputer, Watson, defeated two "Jeopardy!" champions — including Ken Jennings — in a three-day contest.

A year after AlphaGo's success, an AI named Libaratus beat four of the world's top professional players in 120,000 hands of no-limit, two-player poker. Then, in 2019, another DeepMind AI program named AlphaStar bested 99.8% of human players in the popular video game "Starcraft II." 



Physicists rejoiced in 2016 when they detected two black holes colliding a billion light-years away.

The catastrophic collision created ripples in space-time, also known as gravitational waves. Einstein predicted the existence of these gravitational waves in 1915, but he thought they'd be too weak to ever pick up on Earth. New detection tools have proved otherwise.

This collision was the first event scientists observed using gravitational-wave detectors. Then in 2017, they observed two neutron stars merging. In August 2019, astrophysicists detected the billion-year-old aftermath of a collision between a black hole and a neutron star (the super-dense remnant of a dead star).



The same year, astronomers also spotted evidence that a mysterious planet or object 10 times the size of Earth orbits in the outer solar system. They nicknamed it "Planet 9."

"For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system's planetary census is incomplete,"one of the planet's discoverers said



In 2017, geologists announced they'd discovered a new continent, called Zealandia, hidden under the Pacific Ocean.

The lost land of Zealandia sits on the ocean floor between New Zealand and New Caledonia.

It wasn't always sunken – researchers have found fossils that suggested novel kinds of plants and organisms once lived there. Some argue that Zealandia should be counted alongside our (more visible) seven continents.

In 2019, scientists found that another ancient continent had slid under what is now southern Europe about 120 million years ago. The researchers named this continent Greater Adria. Its uppermost regions formed mountain ranges across Europe, like the Alps.



That year brought a new breakthrough in genetics, too: Scientists successfully created synthetic DNA.

All living creatures' DNA is made up of two types of amino acid pairs: A-T (adenine – thymine) and G-C (guanine – cytosine). This four-letter alphabet forms the basis for all genetic information in the natural world.

But scientists invented two new letters, an unnatural pair of X-Y bases, that they seamlessly integrated into the genetic alphabet of E. coli bacteria.

Floyd Romesburg, who led the research, previously told Business Insider that his invention could improve the way we treat diseases. For example, it could change the way proteins degrade inside the body, helping drugs stay in your system longer. Romesburg said his team will be investigating how the finding might help cancer treatments and drugs for autoimmune diseases.



It was also a breakthrough year for self-driving car technology.

In September 2017, Audi announced it had produced the world's first "Level 3" autonomous car — meaning its self-driving mode requires no human feet, hands, or eyes. The A8 sedan can wholly, safely control itself in self-driving mode, only needing a human to take over in the event of bad weather or disappearing lane lines.

Tesla Autopilot drivers, for comparison, have to be ready to take over at any moment, so they're counseled to keep their eyes on the road at all times.

Just two months later, Waymo — the autonomous vehicle division of Alphabet, Google's parent company — revealed that it was testing self-driving minivans in the streets of Arizona without any humans at all behind the wheel. In 2018, Waymo launched the first fully autonomous taxi service in the US.



Astronomers also witnessed another interstellar collision in 2017. When two neutron stars collided, scientists were able to see how all the gold in the universe was created.

The two massive, exploded stars hit each other at one-third the speed of light and created gravitational waves. Scientific instruments on Earth picked up the waves from that crash, an event astronomers say only happens once every 100,000 years.

The crash happened 130 million light years away from Earth, researchers discovered. It caused the formation of $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of gold and produced huge stores of silver and platinum, too.



That year, researchers at a Hawaiian astronomical observatory also observed the first interstellar object ever seen in our solar system, named 'Oumuamua.

Scientists only had a few weeks to study the interstellar interloper before it got too far, and too dim, to see with Earth-based telescopes.

Guesses as to what the object is run the gamut from comet to asteroid to alien spaceship. One Harvard University astronomer, Avi Loeb, has speculated that 'Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial scout, but nearly all other experts who have studied 'Oumuamua say that hypothesis is extraordinarily unlikely.



2017 was also a bittersweet year for astronomers who had to say goodbye to NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which took a fatal dive into Saturn in October.

Cassini had been exploring Saturn and its moons for 13 years before the probe plunged to its death on September 15. Scientists planned the crash to ensure that Cassini wouldn't one day run out of fuel and hit one of Saturn's potentially habitable moons (thereby contaminating it with Earthly bacteria).

During its final dive, Cassini beamed back amazing photos of Saturn as we'd never seen the planet before. That last portion of the mission began with a flyby of the planet's moon, Titan. Then Cassini jetted through a 1,200-mile opening between Saturn and its rings of ice — an unprecedented feat.

The spacecraft then angled down into the planet's clouds and burned up.



Toward the end of 2017, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new gene therapy treatment for blind people.

The cure for a form of hereditary blindness called leber congenital amaurosis is the first gene therapy approved by the FDA for an inherited disease.

The treatment, called Luxturna, is a one-time virus dose that gets injected into a patient's retina. The corrected gene in the virus taps out the flawed, blindness-inducing gene in the eye, and produces a key vision-producing protein that patients with the disease normally can't make.

People start noticing a difference in their sight within a month. In clinical trials of the treatment, 13 out of 20 patients saw positive results. The treatment could cost as much as $1 million for a single injection, however.



The following year, genetics news of a very different nature came out: Chinese geneticist He Jiankui announced he had successfully genetically modified human embryos.

Jiankui claimed to have edited genes in a pair of twins born in China in November. By using the DNA-editing technique called CRISPR, he said, the babies were born immune to HIV.

This type of genetic manipulation is banned in most parts of the world, since any genetic mutations that the babies may have would get passed on to their offspring, with potentially disastrous consequences. 

In 2019, the MIT Technology Review released excerpts from Jiankui's research. The unpublished manuscripts revealed that in the process of trying to manipulate the babies' HIV resistance — which some experts say was unsuccessful— Jiankui may have introduced unintended mutations.



In 2018, NASA launched another rover to the red planet. InSight touched down on November 26.

NASA's InSight lander spent more than six months careening through space before it landed safely on Martian soil.

The robot is charged with exploring Mars' deep interior and helping scientists understand why Mars wound up a cold desert planet while Earth did not.

InSight has given scientists the unprecedented ability to detect and monitor Mars quakes— seismic events deep inside the planet.



On Earth, scientists have made monumental — though often troubling — discoveries throughout the decade. In 2018, scientists found that atmospheric carbon dioxide had reached its highest level in at least 800,000 years.

Fossil fuels like coal contain carbon dioxide, methane, and other compounds that trap heat from the sun. When we extract and burn these fuels for energy, that releases those gases into the atmosphere, where they accumulate and heat up the Earth over time.

That's what made 2016 the hottest year on record. So far, 2019 is the second-hottest year since records began 140 years ago, with July being the hottest month ever recorded.

A landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel in Climate Change (IPCC) warned that slashing greenhouse-gas emissions in the next decade is crucial in order to avoid the worst consequences of severe climate change.



Climate researchers have also found that the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting at unprecedented rates.

An April 2019 study revealed that the Greenland ice sheet is sloughing off an average of 286 billion tons of ice per year. Two decades ago, the annual average was just 50 billion.

In 2012, Greenland lost more than 400 billion tons of ice

Antarctica, meanwhile, lost an average of 252 billion tons of ice per year in the last decade. In the 1980s, by comparison, Antarctica lost 40 billion tons of ice annually.

What's more, parts of Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica are retreating by up to 2,625 feet per year, contributing to 4% of sea-level rise worldwideA study published in July suggested that Thwaites' melting is likely approaching an irreversible point after which the entire glacier could collapse into the ocean. If that happens, global sea levels could rise by more than 1.5 feet.



On January 1, 2019, NASA's nuclear-powered New Horizons spacecraft flew past a mysterious, mountain-sized object 4 billion miles from Earth.

The object, called MU69, is nicknamed Arrokoth, which means "sky" in the Powhatan/Algonquian language (it was previously nicknamed Ultima Thule). It's the most distant object humanity has ever visited.

The New Horizons probe took hundreds of photographs as it flew by the space rock at 32,200 miles per hour.

Images revealed that Arrokoth is flat like a pancake, rather than spherical in shape. The unprecedented data will likely reveal new clues about the solar system's evolution and how planets like Earth formed, though scientists are still receiving and processing the information from the distant probe.



Over 5.5 million miles from Earth, a Japanese spacecraft landed on the surface of an asteroid called Ryugu in July.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched its Hayabusa-2 probe in December 2014. Hayabusa-2 arrived at Ryugu in June 2018, but didn't land on the asteroid's surface until this year.

In order to collect samples from deep within the space rock, Hayabusa-2 blasted a hole in the asteroid before landing. The mission plan calls for the probe to bring those samples back to Earth. By studying Ryugu's innermost rocks and debris — which have been sheltered from the wear and tear of space — scientists hope to learn how asteroids like this may have seeded Earth with key ingredients for life billions of years ago.



2019 was also a watershed year for the study of black holes. In April, the Event Horizon Telescope team published the first-ever image of a black hole.

The unprecedented photo shows the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, which is about 54 million light-years away from Earth. The black hole's mass is equivalent to 6.5 billion suns. 

Though the image is somewhat fuzzy, it showed that, as predicted, black holes look like dark spheres surrounded by a glowing ring of light.

Scientists struggled for decades to capture a black hole on camera, since black holes distort space-time, ensuring that nothing can break free of their gravitational pull — even light. That's why the image shows a unique shadow in the form of a perfect circle at the center.



NASA scientists also discovered an exoplanet that could be our best bet for finding alien life outside our solar system.

In September, scientists announced they'd detected water vapor on a potentially habitable planet for the first time. The planet, K2-18b, is a super-Earth that orbits a red dwarf star 110 light-years away.

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope discovered K2-18b in 2015, three years before the telescope was shut down. During its nine-year mission, Kepler discovered more than 2,500 exoplanets.

But K2-18b is the only known planet outside our solar system with water, an atmosphere, and a temperature range that could support liquid water on its surface. That makes it our "best candidate for habitability," one researcher said.



After three decades of research and development work, the world's first malaria vaccine program began in April.

In the pilot program, children up to 2 years old in Malawi, Ghana, and Kenya can receive the vaccine. The new vaccine prevented 4 in 10 malaria cases in clinical trials, including 3 in 10 life-threatening cases.

Malaria kills about 435,000 people each year, most of them children. 

"We need new solutions to get the malaria response back on track, and this vaccine gives us a promising tool to get there," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said in a release. "The malaria vaccine has the potential to save tens of thousands of children's lives."



In December, the World Health Organization (WHO) prequalified an Ebola vaccine for the first time, a critical step that will help speed up its licensing, access, and roll-out.

The vaccine comes in addition to two experimental treatments proven to dramatically boost Ebola survival rates.

The two new treatments, called REGN-EB3 and mAb-114, are cocktails of antibodies that get injected into people's bloodstreams. These therapies saved about 90% of new infected patients in the Congo after the WHO declared the Ebola outbreak in Africa to be a global health emergency.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen contributed to this story.




What if Santa really delivered presents in one night?

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  • If Santa really delivered presents on Christmas Eve, he'd need to fly over a thousand times faster than the world's faster jet fighter to visit  about 240 million homes. If every kid received one mid-sized LEGO set, the gifts would weigh a whopping 600,000 tons.
  • Just like a spacecraft heats up when re-entering the atmosphere, the reindeer would heat to blistering temperatures that would turn vaporize them! Meanwhile, a force tens of thousands of times stronger than gravity would pin him to the sleigh, smashing his bones and internal organs into jelly.
  • On the brighter side, Santa would snack on 720 million sugar cookies and drink enough milk to fill 23 Olympic sized swimming pools!
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Every Christmas Eve, certain traditions say that Santa has just one night to deliver presents to millions of children around the globe. Now, this might seem unreasonable from a scientific perspective. But we wondered, exactly how unreasonable is it?

Overall, it's difficult to determine how many people around the world celebrate a Santa-centric Christmas on December 25th. But if we consider certain religious and cultural traditions, we get a rough estimate of about 600 million people. Now, let's say each household has, on average, two and a half kids. So Santa only needs to visit 240 million homes. Even better? He has more time to get the job done than you might think. Legend has it that he drops by when the kids are asleep. So that gives him eight hours, right? Well, hold up. We mustn't forget about time zones. There are 24 broad time zones worldwide, each one hour apart. So factor in the different Christmas Eve start times across the planet, and Kringle's got a luxurious 31 hours to make his deliveries.

Unfortunately, this is where his luck runs out. Because just to reach every house, he'll have to fly 1,200 times faster than the world's fastest jet fighter. That's a lot to ask of nine reindeer, which can only gallop up to 80 kilometers per hour on average. Way too slow.

But to be fair, that's the best they can do on the ground. Since we don't know exactly how fast a reindeer can fly, let's assume they can manage those incredible speeds. Even then, the load they have to lug is much too heavy for them. If every kid receives a single mid-sized Lego set, the bag alone would weigh a whopping 600,000 tons, or about 20 Statue of Liberties. Meanwhile, the average reindeer can pull up to twice their weight, or about 225 kilograms. So those deer aren't going anywhere. And even if they could, well, it wouldn't be pretty.

For starters, the team would create a massive sonic boom as they hurdle through the air at 3,000 times faster than the speed of sound, deafening any bystanders on the ground below. Merry Christmas folks! But it gets worse. Once Rudolph and Co. take off, they vaporize before they reach their first house. Just like how a rocket heats up when it reenters the atmosphere at tremendous speeds, the reindeer would heat to blistering temperatures that would turn them into venison jerky.

And Santa wouldn't fare much better because he's sitting on what amounts to the worst roller-coaster ride on Earth. When a typical coaster accelerates, you get pushed back against your seat. But in Santa's case, to accelerate to those extreme speeds makes for a much stronger push. A force tens of thousands of times stronger than gravity would pin into the sleigh, smashing his bones and internal organs to jelly.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Let's assume Santa and friends miraculously survive this ordeal. He slips his conveniently boneless body through chimney after chimney, drops off the gifts, and now gets to munch on his well-deserved treats. A lot of treats. If every household offers him three sugar cookies and one 8-ounce glass of whole milk, that's 720 million cookies and enough milk to fill 23 Olympic swimming pools total. Now, that adds up to 396 billion calories. Plenty to see him through his hibernation until Christmas comes round again.

SEE ALSO: What if the Earth stopped orbiting the Sun?

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An incredible animation by a planetary scientist shows how fast each planet spins by putting them in one giant globe

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planet rotations animation

Every planet turns to its own beat, and a new animation from a video-savvy scientist shows just how different those rotations are.

James O'Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the Japanese space agency (JAXA) and formerly at NASA, spends his free time making animations of space concepts like the history of the moon and the vastness of our solar system.

He recently created a video showing slices of each planet spinning at its own speed — all in one giant globe.

"I had the idea to make this back in December last year but I didn't think people would be interested in it," O'Donoghue said on Twitter when he shared a clip of the animation. As of Friday, that version of the video had over 215,000 views.

The animation, below, shows how quickly the planets spin on their axes relative to one another. Jupiter, for example, rotates 2.4 times faster than Earth.

As one commenter pointed out on Twitter, it can be weird to watch Africa and South America making their rounds near the North Pole of this stitched-together globe. Earth's position falls there, however, because O'Donoghue lined up the planets in their order from the sun, from Mercury to Neptune.

"I picked the slices of latitude of each planet that were most interesting," he explained. 

O'Donoghue picked the piece of Jupiter that has its Great Red Spot, the part of Neptune where its darkest storm brews, and a slice of Saturn that shows high contrast between its clouds.

You might also notice that the strip second from the bottom spins in the opposite direction of the others. That's Uranus, which is tilted nearly 90 degrees, meaning that it appears to spin on its side and backwards (relative to the other planets).

Venus also spins counterclockwise — it's the second strip from the top of O'Donoghue's globe. But the planet rotates so slowly that you can barely tell it's moving backwards. It takes 243 Earth days for Venus to rotate once.

In the last year, O'Donoghue has created a slew of scientific animations like this. His first were for a NASA news release about Saturn's vanishing rings. After that, he moved on to other difficult-to-grasp concepts, like the torturously slow speed of light.

"My animations were made to show as instantly as possible the whole context of what I'm trying to convey," O'Donoghue previously told Business Insider. "When I revised for my exams, I used to draw complex concepts out by hand just to truly understand, so that's what I'm doing here."

SEE ALSO: A stunning animation by a planetary scientist shows how huge our solar system is — and why that makes it so hard to depict

DON'T MISS: An incredible video shows what we would see if the planets replaced the moon. But that would turn Earth into a volcanic hellscape.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The worst storms on Earth are nothing compared to the weather on other planets

Legendary mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson has died at the age of 96

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Freeman Dyson

Legendary mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson has died at the age of 96, according to a press release issued by the Institute for Advanced Study. 

The British-born mathematician and physicist, best known for unifying the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Richard Feynman, suffered a fall on his way to his office, his daughter Mia Dyson first told the Maine Public. He passed away on Friday. 

Dyson had a colorful career: He worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Airforce in World War II, before attending Cambridge University to get his undergraduate degree in mathematics. He went on to do graduate work in Cornell University, and became a professor there despite never having formally gotten a PhD.

Dyson worked on a diverse range of physics and mathematical problems: nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology (one of his ideas, the Dyson Sphere, was even featured in a "Star Trek" episode). He won the Max Planck Medal and the Templeton Prize, and wrote often-quoted books like "Disturbing the Universe" and "The Scientist as Rebel."

He also kept track of the politics that later surrounded his expertise. Notably, he was among 29 scientists who supported the Obama administration's 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. He also acted as a a military adviser regarding the use of nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War in 1967.

And in 2009, he was the subject of a lengthy profile in the New York Times Magazine after expressing his skepticism about the scientific predictions surrounding climate change. He stuck to that conviction, telling NPR in 2015 that, "I'm not saying the climate disasters aren't real, I'm merely saying we don't know how to prevent them."

Dyson is survived by his wife of 64 years and six children. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Jeff Bezos reportedly just spent $165 million on a Beverly Hills estate — here are all the ways the world's richest man makes and spends his money

Astronauts on the space station are helping to forge a bizarre 5th state of matter that disappears in seconds on Earth

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NASA International Space Station

  • Researchers created a fifth state of matter in 1995, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), by cooling atoms to temperatures lower than in interstellar space.
  • BECs don't exist naturally and have only seconds-long lifespans when subject to the force of gravity.
  • By creating BECs in space, researchers can study this form of matter for longer.
  • Astronauts on the International Space Station have helped scientists successfully and consistently create BECs in orbit, a new study reports. This could aid research into the mysteries surrounding gravity and the expansion of the universe.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

NASA sent a dishwasher-sized box of lasers up to the International Space Station two years ago. The goal: create a bizarre, fifth form of matter that's not found in nature — the Bose-Einstein condensate.

This type of matter consists of clouds of a few million atoms that have been chilled with lasers inside a vacuum, to temperatures even lower than in interstellar space. At such super-low temperatures, atoms lose their individuality and blob together. This makes it easier for researchers to study the quantum world: a subatomic realm in which everything is smaller than a single atom.

The box of lasers, fittingly, is called the Cold Atom Laboratory

While Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) have been made on Earth for 25 years, gravity makes them difficult to study; it yanks them to the ground, making them disappear within fractions of a second.

In space, however, it's a different story. A study published June 11 in the journal Nature reports that the Cold Atom Lab on the space station has successfully and consistently created BECs in microgravity. That gives researchers opportunities to examine the ultracool matter for longer periods of time than on Earth.

"It was recognized early on that microgravity would come in handy, and going to space would give us a lot of advantages in terms of measurement time," David Aveline, the lead author of the study and a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, told Business Insider. 

More time to measure BECs means more precise measurements — and that could help researchers study gravitational waves and dark energy.

An unprecedented space laboratory 

cold atom lab

Ever since the first Bose-Einstein condensate was created in 1995, researchers have been searching for ways to extend the matter's lifespan beyond a second or two. Some researchers have tried to create their own microgravity environments by throwing a BEC-creating apparatus off a 440-foot tower to achieve free-fall. Some weightless experiments have also been done inside a rocket.

"It takes a lot of effort to gather a few measurements," Aveline said.

By contrast, the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) has endless microgravity, so it can collect data for years. 

"We're getting to make BECs on a daily basis, for many hours a day," Aveline said. "CAL is completely remote-controlled. We're running it from computers on the ground, literally inside our living rooms."

Christina Koch working on cold atom lab

Originally, NASA's goal was to have CAL function for one year before it would need replacement parts, Aveline said. But thanks to astronauts like Christina Koch who check up on it and occasionally update its hardware, the floating laboratory just passed its two-year mark in space.

Bose-Einstein condensates teach us about the quantum world

CAL uses lasers and magnets to chill atoms to within 1 10-billionth of a degree above absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius). 

Typically, atoms are arranged in a particular order to create matter like solids, liquids, and gases. But Albert Einstein and physicist Satyendra Nath Bose predicted in 1924 that if atoms could be cooled enough, they'd lose their individuality. That would lead them to form a lump of mass about 1 millimeter across that behaves as one entity. This is a BEC, sometimes known as a superfluid.

albert einstein office

The reason scientists care about BECs is because they bridge the gap between the world we can see — which is governed by classical physics — and the subatomic world, in which quantum physics reigns.

"They're like the holy grail" of quantum physics, Aveline said.

Quantum physics describes the behavior of the smallest things in the universe. According to its laws, tiny particles like electrons could be in many places at the same time. So physicists describe those electrons using probabilities that show how likely it is an electron is positioned in a certain configuration at a given time.  

The atoms in BECs follow quantum laws, but because they've blobbed together, they're large enough to be observed with a microscope — which enables scientists to measure them and observe their behavior.

 

 

 

bose einstein condensate

What CAL's experiments can teach us 

One piece of new hardware that Koch installed into CAL is an atom interferometer, an instrument that uses BECs to measure changes in gravity across a planet's surface.

"Analyzing the gravitational field of our planet can tell us a lot about its structure (is water or stone or oil below?), and analyzing its variation can teach us about processes going on (how much does the water level of the oceans rise?)," Maike Lachmann, a physicist at Leibniz University, told Business Insider in an email.

The applications for this type of measurement are huge, according to Lachmann and Aveline — it can help scientists understand what's happening under Earth's surface and also map moons and other planets.

apollo 13 mission moon surface craters nasa projectapolloarchive flickr 21412012804_8365886a58_o

Additionally, physicists are looking into using atom interferometry to measure gravitational waves or other potential sources of energy in the universe, like dark energy.

Dark energy is the force that's making space expand; it accounts for 70% of the universe. (The remaining chunk is 25% dark matter — an unseen particle that exudes a large gravitational force — and 5% normal matter, which makes up everything we see.)

Some researchers suspect that dark energy and dark matter are derived from not-yet-seen particles called axions and solitons. A study last month suggested that BECs could be used to detect those axions.

Other research from 2015 and 2016 used BECs to probe for different possible sources of dark energy.

Measuring dark energy is critical, since scientists think it could be responsible for accelerating the universe's expansion — pushing galaxies apart at an ever-faster rate.

A study published last year found that the universe is expanding 9% faster than scientists predicted it should be — a finding one Nobel-prize winner said"may be the most exciting development in cosmology in decades."

David Mosher contributed reporting to this story.

SEE ALSO: Researchers have succeeded in creating a fifth state of matter in space

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NOW WATCH: This mind-melting thought experiment of Einstein's reveals how to manipulate time

An underground dark-matter experiment may have stumbled on the 'holy grail': a new particle that could upend the laws of physics

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xenon dark matter experiment

  • A dark-matter experiment in an underground Italian lab may have discovered a new particle called the solar axion.
  • If that's indeed what was detected, it would be the first direct evidence of a particle that shouldn't exist according to the known laws of physics.
  • Alternatively, the data could also reveal new and surprising qualities of mysterious particles called neutrinos.
  • Larger, more sensitive experiments in the next year will help scientists figure out whether they have indeed discovered a new particle.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

An underground vat of liquid xenon in Italy may have just detected a new particle, born in the heart of the sun.

If that's indeed what happened, it could upend laws of physics that have held fast for roughly 50 years.

Researchers created the underground vat to search for dark matter, the elusive stuff that makes up 85% of all matter in the universe. Scientists know dark matter exists because they can measure the way its gravity affects faraway galaxies, but they've never detected it directly before.

That's why an international group of researchers built the experiment at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory. The vat is filled with 3.2 metric tons of liquid xenon, and those atoms interact with tiny particles when they collide. Each interaction, or "event," produces a flash of light and sheds electrons.

In theory, this experiment is sensitive enough to detect interactions with particles of dark matter.

xenoninhallb

In the latest version of the experiment, researchers expected the machine to detect 232 events within a year, based on known particles. But instead, it detected 285 events — 53 more than predicted.

What's more, the amount of energy released in those extra events corresponded with the predicted energies of a yet-undiscovered particle called the solar axion: a type of particle that physicists have hypothesized exists but never observed.

"The hypothetical particle that could potentially explain the XENON data is one that is much too heavy to be dark matter, but could be created by the sun," Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology who is not affiliated with XENON, told Business Insider. "If that were true, it would be hugely important — it would be a Nobel Prize-winning finding."

It's also possible, however, that the interactions were anomalies, which pop up all the time in highly sensitive physics experiments like XENON.

A new particle forged in the heart of the sun

sun solar eruption

Particle physicists study the smallest, most fundamental components of the universe: elementary particles like quarks and gluons, along with forces like gravity and electromagnetism.

"Particle physics is an important part of modern physics, but it's also been stuck for a long while," Carroll said. "The last truly surprising discovery in particle physics was in the 1970s."

That's when what's known as the Standard Model was established — a set of all the rules known to particle physics, which describe all the particles scientists have detected and how they interact with one another.

"With it we can essentially explain every single thing we see in a particle-physics laboratory," Aaron Manalaysay, a dark-matter physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who is unaffiliated with XENON, told Business Insider. "It's probably the most accurate scientific model in history. But we also have good reason to think that it's not the most fundamental model of nature that exists."

Engineers assembled the Xenon experiment's electric field cage.

Physicists have hints that the model doesn't fully capture the way our universe behaves — their indirect observations of dark matter are among those hints. But they have yet to directly detect a particle that lies beyond the Standard Model.

That's why it would be a big deal if XENON really has found a solar axion.

"That would be the first concrete discovery of something beyond the Standard Model," Manalaysay said. "That's kind of the holy grail right now of particle physics."

Carroll agreed — but he added that the unprecedented nature of the potential discovery "is one of the reasons we think it's probably not there."

In other words, without further evidence, nobody is celebrating yet.

For now, several other theories could also explain the extra events XENON researchers saw.

Misbehaving neutrinos could point to a 'new physics'

xenon dark matter experiment photomultiplier tubes array

Another possible explanation for XENON's 53 extra events is that neutrinos — a subatomic particle with no electrical charge — could have driven the interactions.

That would also defy the known laws of physics, though, since it would mean that neutrinos have a magnetic field much larger than what the Standard Model predicts.

"That could point potentially to new physics beyond the Standard Model," Manalaysay said.

xenon dark matter experiment tank

It wouldn't be the first time neutrinos have broken the rules. According to the Standard Model, neutrinos shouldn't have mass — yet they do. The discovery that they have a sizable magnetic field would be yet another clue that something is missing from the model.

"Neutrinos are really strange beasts, and we don't really understand them," Manalaysay said.

Larger, more sensitive dark-matter experiments are coming

xenon dark matter experiment computer daq data

It's also possible that XENON's extra events didn't happen at all — though that's unlikely. The researchers calculated a chance of two in 10,000 that the detected events were due to random fluctuation.

The signals may have come from other mundane particle interactions, however, making their explanation far less interesting than axions or neutrinos. The extra events could have come from tiny amounts of tridium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, decaying inside the vat. Argon isotopes would produce a similar effect, according to Manalaysay.

"It wouldn't take much. It would just take a few atoms," he said, adding that a number of other things unknown to the researchers could also be responsible for the excess interactions.

"We've gone down this road before, where there's a little bit of an anomaly that you aren't expecting ... and then it goes away," Carroll said. "So this is clearly a place where you need to do a better experiment, and they're planning to do exactly that."

xenontpc

A new generation of XENON-like experiments, currently in the works in the US and Europe, should help researchers study these extra events and determine which particles are causing them. That's because the new experiments will be larger and significantly more sensitive.

"If this is real, we will absolutely see it in our next generation of experiments," Manalaysay said. He has worked with one such effort, called the Large Underground Xenon dark-matter experiment. "It's like you're going into a quieter and quieter room ... You start hearing new things you couldn't hear in a louder room."

Whereas XENON picked up 53 unexplained events, the successor to LUX — called LUX-ZEPLIN — could detect 800, according to Manalaysay. Despite delays caused by the coronavirus, he added, new experiments will likely be running and returning results "within the next year."

"It's like a teaser," he said. "The season's finale ends on a cliff-hanger, and you've got to wait until the next season."

SEE ALSO: A 'spooky' effect of physics that Einstein couldn't believe has been photographed for the first time

DON'T MISS: The US is building its first new particle collider in decades on Long Island. Stephen Hawking called the technology a 'time machine.'

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NOW WATCH: The most powerful physics machine on Earth may have found something that breaks the laws of physics as we know them

The Beirut explosion created a huge mushroom cloud and visible blast wave, but nuclear-weapons experts say it wasn't an atomic bomb. Here's why.

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A picture shows the scene of an explosion in Beirut on August 4, 2020

  • An explosion at a port rocked the Lebanese capital city of Beirut on Tuesday, killing at least dozens of people.
  • As videos of the explosion spread across social-media sites, some observers likened the appearance of a mushroom cloud to that of an atomic bomb.
  • The Lebanese prime minister has said the blast came from a stockpile of ammonium nitrate in a warehouse.
  • Nuclear-weapons experts say the detonation was definitely not triggered by an atomic bomb.
  • Atomic explosions are characterized by a blinding flash of light, a pulse of searing heat, and radioactive fallout, none of which were detected.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When an enormous explosion created a mushroom cloud over Beirut on Tuesday, killing at least dozens of people and injuring thousands more, online observers and conspiracy theorists quickly jumped to a frightening conclusion: A nuclear bomb had gone off in Lebanon's capital city. But as state officials say, and contrary to those fast-spreading rumors, the explosion was almost certainly not caused by a nuclear weapon.

Even before Lebanese officials said the explosion was caused by a large stockpile of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at the port, according to The Guardian, experts who study nuclear weapons quickly and unequivocally rejected the idea that Beirut had been hit with a nuclear bomb.

Key to those rejections are the videos that Beirut residents managed to record of the huge detonation.

People had trained cameras on the Beirut port at the time of the blast because a worrisome cloud of smoke rose beforehand. Some of those videos show small flashes of light and reports (or sounds) that are distinctive to fireworks. Moments later, the huge explosion — which came with a visible blast wave and mushroom-like cloud of smoke — rocked the area, destroying nearby buildings and shattering distant windows.

In a tweet that accumulated thousands of likes and reshares before it was deleted, one user wrote: "Good Lord. Lebanese media says it was a fireworks factory. Nope. That's a mushroom cloud. That's atomic."

Vipin Narang, who studies nuclear proliferation and strategy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, immediately spiked the claim. "I study nuclear weapons. It is not," Narang tweeted on Tuesday.

Martin Pfeiffer, a doctoral candidate at the University of New Mexico who researches the human history of nuclear weapons, also rejected assertions on social media that a "nuke" caused the blast. "Obviously not a nuke," Pfeiffer tweeted, saying later: "That's a fire setting off explosives or chemicals."

Pfeiffer indicated that the explosion lacked two hallmarks of a nuclear detonation: a "blinding white flash" and a thermal pulse, or surge of heat, which would otherwise start fires all over the area and severely burn people's skin.

The explosion did trigger a powerful blast wave that apparently shattered windows across Beirut, and it was briefly visible as an expanding, shell-like cloud — something often seen in historical footage of nuclear detonations. But Pfeiffer noted such blast-wave clouds, known to weapons researchers as Wilson clouds, are made when humid air gets compressed and causes the water in it to condense. In other words: They aren't unique to nuclear bombs.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation reshared on Twitter by Narang estimates the blast was equivalent to about 240 tons of TNT, or about 10 times what the US military's "mother of all bombs" is capable of unleashing. By contrast, the Little Boy atomic bomb that the US dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 was about 1,000 times as powerful.

As a counterpoint to suggestions the Beirut explosion was caused by a nuclear weapon, Pfeiffer offered a video showing the detonation of a rocket-propelled "Davy Crockett" nuclear weapon, which exploded with a force equivalent to about 20 tons of TNT.

The Davy Crockett was one-tenth as strong as the estimated strength of the Beirut explosion but still had a distinctive flash that's missing from Tuesday's blast. No reports suggest there was radioactive fallout after the Beirut blast, which would have been quickly detected.

It's perhaps unsurprising that some might speculate such a large blast in a major city might be an act of nuclear terrorism. In fact, it's one of 15 disaster scenarios the US government has simulated and planned for (to the point at which it created scripts for local authorities to use after such an attack).

But in this case, Beirut's tragedy was not in any way nuclear.

SEE ALSO: I just nuked Manhattan in a realistic new VR simulation, and the experience changed how I understand the bomb

DON'T MISS: If a nuclear weapon is about to explode, here's what a safety expert says you can do to survive

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NOW WATCH: Here's how easy it is for the US president to launch a nuclear weapon

NASA patented a faster, cheaper route to the moon. The first spacecraft to use it could make Nobel Prize-winning discoveries about the universe.

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dapper Dark Ages Polarimeter Pathfinder spacecraft mission concept moon farside university colorado boulder nasa

Summary List Placement

The moon is both seductively close to Earth and cosmically far away: Decades after the end of the space race, it remains extraordinarily expensive and difficult to actually get there.

The journey just got a bit easier, however, thanks to a freshly published NASA invention. The agency's patent doesn't cover a new piece of equipment or lines of code, but a trajectory — a route designed to save a lunar-bound mission time, fuel, and money and boost its scientific value.

On June 30, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted and published NASA's patent for a series of orbital maneuvers, which Business Insider first learned about via a tweet by a lawyer named Jeff Steck.

The technique isn't meant for large spaceships that carry astronauts or rovers, but for smaller, more tightly budgeted missions tasked with doing meaningful science. And the first spacecraft to take advantage of this new orbital path could deliver unprecedented discoveries from the far side of the moon.

Called the Dark Ages Polarimeter Pathfinder, or Dapper, the upcoming mission aims to record, for the first time, low-frequency radio waves emitted during the earliest epochs of the universe — when atoms, stars, black holes, and galaxies were just beginning to form, and where scientists may detect the first signals of as-yet-unseen dark matter.

Charting a new budget-friendly path to the moon

dare dark ages radio explorer spacecraft mission gto geosynchronous transfer orbit patent graphics earth moon nasa

When NASA launched three astronauts to the moon in 1968, it took the crew just a few days to get there. Such direct shots are expensive, though, requiring an enormous rocket to climb out of Earth's deep gravity well.

There are far more efficient paths to the moon that can use smaller rockets — if you have time to spare, which robots do. By taking time to swing around the Earth, for instance, a spacecraft can steal some of the planet's momentum and slingshot out to the moon in a series of long orbits that cost it little to no fuel.

Fuel remains necessary to correct orbits and maneuver through space, but every ounce a spacecraft carries is mass that an engineer can't dedicate toward other components, including scientific instruments.

The calculus is especially tricky for compact spacecraft like Dapper, which would be about the size of a microwave, since there is (quite literally) less margin for error. Faced with the extra challenge of trying to fly Dapper on a relatively thin $150 million budget from NASA's Explorers program, the team behind the mission concept realized they couldn't buy their own rocket ride all the way to lunar orbit.

"This trajectory to the moon arose out of necessity, as these things often do,"Jack Burns, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder and leader of the Dapper mission, told Business Insider. "We needed to keep the launch costs low and find a cheap way to get to the moon."

They started with a flight they knew they could afford: one to geosynchronous or high-Earth orbit, a region about 22,236 miles from Earth's equator (about one-tenth of the way to the moon). It's a common destination for telecommunications and other satellites built to hover above one spot on the planet. Dapper is small enough to piggyback on such missions.

"If we could just get a launch into high-Earth orbit, geosynchronous orbit, then we could get the rest of the way there with only a modest tank of fuel," Burns said.

After crunching the numbers, the team found a new low-energy trajectory to the moon, which their patent describes as a "method for transferring a spacecraft from geosynchronous transfer orbit to lunar orbit." It enlists the help of Earth and the moon's gravity to speed up and slow down Dapper at the right moments, cutting down on the amount of propellant required. NASA says this new spin on the gravity assist keeps the flight time to about 2 1/2 months, whereas similar options can take six months.

The trajectory also comes with numerous options to slip a spacecraft into an orbit of any angle around the moon, at practically any time. And it avoids a zone of radiation around Earth called the Van Allen belts, which can damage sensitive electronics.

Why NASA is patenting and licensing ways to reach the moon

earthrise earth from moon apollo 8 nasa

It may seem odd to patent lunar travel, but Burns said it is really no different from any other invention. "It's a creation that was the result of doing numerical modeling of planetary trajectories, he said. "So it is intellectual property."

NASA patents and licenses inventions to achieve the "widest distribution" of a technology, Dan Lockney, a NASA executive, told IPWatchdog in 2018.

"Securing patents and licensing the technologies is a method NASA and other government agencies use to ensure access to government-funded innovations," Clare Skelly, a NASA representative, told Business Insider in an email.

The agency charges as much as $50,000 to license its patents but typically asks for $5,000 to $10,000, plus royalties. "It is through the upfront fees that NASA seeks to recover some of its investment in the patent filing and maintenance costs," the agency's licensing website says.

In other words: Doing the grunt work of patenting and then charging a minimum for that work is a formal and industry-compatible practice of disseminating the fruits of NASA's labors.

Unofficially, NASA's scheme also keeps private companies and foreign nations from stockpiling important space technologies for exorbitant sums, and that helps foster American missions and international collaborations. (The agency does occasionally release patents into the public domain.)

Burns said he didn't believe that NASA will "ever make any money" off the new trajectory patent, since it's often a matter of historical record-keeping.

"It just is a marker that lays down that this was your intellectual property — you did this, and you were the creator of it — so that at least when people use it, they give credit," he said.

2 Nobel Prizes may await in the lunar 'cone of silence'

dapper Dark Ages Polarimeter Pathfinder spacecraft mission moon radio cone silence map apj

Dapper's goal is to study the universe from a "cone of silence" on the far side of the moon. In that solitary region, humanity's cacophony of wireless emissions can't interfere with antennas trying to pick up weak, low-frequency emissions from more than 13 billion years ago.

"This is the only truly radio-quiet region in the inner solar system," Burns said. Humanity's pollution of radio waves — which leak out of almost every electronic device — can easily bend around corners and over horizons (so erecting barriers to block them is fruitless). "In order to get the same amount of quiet, you'd have to go out past the orbit of Jupiter, and go that far out in order for the noise just from Earth."

Specifically, the mission seeks to detect radio emissions of the "neutral hydrogen" that dominated the very early universe. The cosmos produced the nuclei, or cores, of these first-ever atoms within a microsecond of the Big Bang; the event's dense, hot soup of energy had expanded and cooled off, permitting protons, neutrons, and electrons to form. About 380,000 years later, that particle soup had cooled off further, allowing the positively charged protons to capture negatively charged electrons and become neutrally charged hydrogen atoms.

The phase is often called the "Dark Ages" because, in visible wavelengths of light, a human wouldn't have seen anything.

"There's no stars. There's no galaxies. There's no other source of radiation. So how do you probe that part of the universe?" Burns said. "You use the one thing that you've got a lot of, which is neutral hydrogen."

The problem is that those radio signals, which reach Earth in the 10-to-100-megahertz range, not only are scrambled by our planet's atmosphere, but match the emissions of countless power supplies, garage-door openers, radio transmitters, space satellites, digital TV signals, and more.

"The radio spectrum down at these frequencies? It's just absolutely filled with garbage," Burns said. Even in space, there's so much interference from humanity and the sun that the radio-equivalent temperature around Earth is "nearly a million degrees," Burns said.

By slipping behind the moon at a moment when the sun is blocked as well as the Earth, Dapper is expected to make the first clear recordings of neutral hydrogen signal. The spacecraft might also gather evidence of the first stars, and possibly the first black holes and galaxies that formed about 500 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called "Cosmic Dawn."

And maybe — just maybe — the spacecraft could turn up the first direct detection of dark matter, which makes up about 80% of the mass in the universe but has yet to be identified.

For the researchers that successfully pull off such a mission, two Nobel Prizes in science could await.

"One is you're detecting when the first stars and galaxies form and what they are. And No. 2, you're detecting dark matter," said Burns, who pooh-poohed the idea of winning any such prize himself.

The race to the early-universe radio emissions is on

big bang

Burns and others came up with the Dark Ages Radio Explorer lunar mission about 10 years ago, which is why that mission and not Dapper is described in the patent, which NASA filed in 2015. (The USPTO is a notoriously slow-moving federal organ.)

Burns said that while NASA was excited about DARE — no one had ever done something like it before — the agency was bound by rules that favored established science and hardware over newer approaches.

"There is no history of low-frequency experiments in space. So, on the one side, people are excited: 'Wow, you're opening up an entire new field of cosmology. This is great. This is fantastic. You need to do it,'" Burns said. "The other side is, 'Well, you've never done it before, so it must be risky.' And so you get marked down for the risks."

After years of being passed up, Burns and his colleagues decided to shrink the car-size spacecraft, ditch novel hardware for proven "heritage" technologies, and try again.

The gambit appears to be working. NASA has awarded Dapper a few million dollars to prove out the concept and mature its hardware design to a flight-ready state over the next two years. When that work concludes, Dapper would have a good chance of getting NASA's full funding to build the spacecraft and book a rocket ride, possibly from SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, or some other provider. (Burns said the mission is estimated to cost about $70 million, plus the price of a launch.)

Burns isn't sure the mission will require the new patent to reach lunar orbit anymore. In the years since his team came up with it, commercial rocket providers have started planning launches to the moon. NASA is also working toward the launch of its massive Space Launch System rocket, which could easily carry Dapper on a flight in the mid-2020s.

"The possible ways to get there have widened considerably since this orbital trajectory was first designed," Burns said.

But time is growing short. There's a push to land humans (and their noisy electronics) at the moon's poles, including an effort by China. That nation's space agency has also landed spacecraft on the lunar far side, where its robots are exploring the surface for the first time.

"Given how simple we have made the Dapper instrument now, a lot of people could build it. A lot of countries, even individual companies, could build this," Burns said. "Every so often I see a paper coming out of China with my figures in it, and they're talking about their own mission."

This story has been updated with new information.

SEE ALSO: Graphic: The distance between Earth and the moon is filled with a mind-boggling amount of spacecraft — and space itself

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NOW WATCH: NASA's $30 billion Artemis missions will attempt to set up a moon base


A collision in space revealed a black hole that physicists thought could never exist. The observatory that detected it cracked a 100-year-old mystery posed by Einstein.

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Summary List Placement

Seven billion years ago, two black holes crashed into each other and merged into one enormous black hole with the mass of 142 suns.

The collision reverberated through space and time, and these ripples — a phenomenon called gravitational waves first predicted by Albert Einstein — traveled 16.5 billion light-years through the universe, reaching Earth in May 2019.

For one-tenth of a second, the waves stretched the mile-long arms of two enormous physics observatories: the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in the US and its Italian companion, Virgo.

The scientists behind these observatories immediately knew they'd detected something unique.

"This doesn't look much like a chirp, which is what we typically detect," Nelson Christensen, a Virgo scientist and a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said in a press release. "This is more like something that goes 'bang,' and it's the most massive signal LIGO and Virgo have seen."

gravitational waves

The black-hole merger the observatories detected is the most massive and distant they've ever picked up. But more strikingly, it defies the known laws of physics.

The scientists' calculations showed that the heavier black hole of the two that crashed was 85 times the mass of the sun — falling within a range that many physicists thought impossible.

"This is exactly what I predicted wasn't there," Stan Woosley, an astrophysicist who models the deaths of massive stars (the process that creates black holes), told Business Insider. "A big black hole smack-dab in the middle of the forbidden zone."

LIGO and Virgo scientists described the new findings in two papers published Wednesday.

"This event opens more questions than it provides answers," Alan Weinstein, a LIGO scientist and a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, said in the release. "From the perspective of discovery and physics, it's a very exciting thing."

'Some of us will owe bottles of wine to others'

Black holes form when heavy stars die and collapse; their gravitational pulls are so strong that not even light can escape.

There are two main types of black hole: stellar-mass (which are tens of solar masses) and supermassive (which have the mass of millions or even billions of suns).

black hole

The 142-solar-mass black hole that formed as a result of this 7-billion-year-old collision is the first detected that's between 100 and 1,000 solar masses. This "intermediate mass" object could reveal a missing link between the two types of black holes. It may also help scientists understand where supermassive black holes come from.

But the 85-solar-mass black hole involved in the collision wasn't supposed to exist at all.

Though black-hole sizes can range "from microscopic to the size of the universe," Woosley said, his models suggest that when it comes to pairs of stars orbiting a shared center of gravity, "it would be very hard to form a black hole with a mass between about 50 and 130 solar masses."

Instead, physics models suggest that stars in that mass range should die in a unique type of supernova explosion that annihilates the star, leaving behind no material to collapse into a dense black hole.

supernova explosion

"But nature finds a way," Woosley said. "In our defense, they had to scrounge around in a substantial fraction of the visible universe to find one. It's very far away."

He added that physicists like him who predicted this mass gap would need to rethink their models. "We and a lot of other people will go back and look hard at our assumptions," Woosley said.

That may also mean paying up on a lost bet against the gravitational-wave researchers.

"The observers will look for more — just one of anything is not nearly so nice as two. And some of us will owe bottles of wine to others," Woosley said. "I'm not 100% convinced that they saw an 85 [solar-mass black hole] but am convinced enough to pay out."

The black hole could have grown from a previous collision

ZTF BH Merger

It's unlikely that this impossible black hole was created directly from a collapsing star, so some researchers think it could have come from a previous merger.

"There are many ideas about how to get around this — merging two stars together, embedding the black hole in a thick disc of material it can swallow, or primordial black holes created in the aftermath of the Big Bang," Christopher Berry, a gravitational-wave astronomer and LIGO researcher, said in the release. "The idea I really like is a hierarchical merger where we have a black hole formed from the previous merger of two smaller black holes."

Woosley, too, said the black hole probably got so big because of something that happened after it formed.

"We really just predict the masses of black holes when they are born," he said.

Another possibility is that the event LIGO and Virgo detected may not have been a black-hole merger at all. A collision, however, is the best fit for the data.

Einstein's predictions led scientists to violent space collisions and a new realm of physics

neutron star collision

Einstein predicted that collisions of massive objects, like black holes and neutron stars, would produce gravitational waves. But he didn't think anyone would ever detect these ripples in space-time — they seemed too weak to pick up on Earth amid all the noise and vibrations here.

For 100 years, it seemed Einstein was right.

But in the late 1990s, LIGO's machines in Washington and Louisiana were built in an attempt to pick up the signals. For the first 13 years, they waited in silence.

Finally, in September 2015, LIGO detected its first gravitational waves: signals from the merger of two black holes some 1.3 billion light-years away. The discovery opened a new field of astronomy, and three researchers who helped conceive of the experiment earned a Nobel Prize in physics.

ligo nsf laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory

Since then, LIGO and Virgo have identified two other types of collisions. The observatories registered gravitational waves from two neutron stars merging for the first time in October 2017. In August 2019, LIGO and Virgo detected what scientists believe was a black hole swallowing a neutron star.

"After so many gravitational-wave observations since the first detection in 2015, it's exciting that the universe is still throwing new things at us, and this 85-solar-mass black hole is quite the curveball," Chase Kimball, an astronomy doctoral student at Northwestern University who works with the LIGO team, said in the release.

Researchers expect to learn more as they delve further into this field of physics. Planned upgrades and new observatories may enable scientists to detect new space collisions every day by the mid-2020s.

"Gravitational-wave observations are revolutionary," Berry said. "Each new detection refines our understanding of how black holes form. With these gravitational-wave breakthroughs, it won't be long until we have enough data to uncover the secrets of how black holes are born and how they grow."

SEE ALSO: The first-ever space helicopter is en route to Mars in the belly of NASA's rover. It's set to record the first Martian drone footage.

DON'T MISS: A scientist's mesmerizing animation shows how our entire solar system orbits an unseen center — and it's not the sun

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NOW WATCH: Why astrophysicists think there's a black hole in our solar system

Time travel is theoretically possible, new calculations show. But that doesn't mean you could change the past.

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Imagine you could hop into a time machine, press a button, and journey back to 2019, before the new coronavirus made the leap from animals to humans.  

What if you could find and isolate patient zero? Theoretically, the pandemic wouldn't happen, right? 

Not quite, because then future-you wouldn't have decided to time travel in the first place.

For decades, physicists have been studying and debating versions of this paradox: If we could travel back in time and change the past, what would happen to the future?

A new study offers a potential answer: Nothing.

"Events readjust around anything that could cause a paradox, so the paradox does not happen," Germain Tobar, the study's author and a student at the University of Queensland, told IFLScience.

His work, published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity last week, suggests that according to the rules of theoretical physics, anything you tried to change in the past would be corrected by subsequent events.

Put simply: It's theoretically possible to go back in time, but you couldn't change history.

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The grandfather paradox

Physicists have considered time travel to be theoretically possible since Einstein came up with his theory of relativity. Einstein's calculations suggest it's possible for an object in our universe to travel through space and time in a circular direction, eventually ending up at a point on its journey where it's been before – a path called a closed time-like curve.

Still, physicists continue to struggle with scenarios like the coronavirus example above, in which time-travelers alter events that already happened. The most famous example is known as the grandfather paradox: Say a time-traveler goes back to the past and kills a younger version of his or her grandfather. The grandfather then wouldn't have any children, erasing the time-traveler's parents and, of course, the time-traveler, too. But then who would kill Grandpa?

A take on this paradox appears in the movie "Back to the Future," when Marty McFly almost stops his parents from meeting in the past – potentially causing himself to disappear. 

time travel dog

To address the paradox, Tobar and his supervisor, Dr. Fabio Costa, used the "billiard-ball model," which imagines cause and effect as a series of colliding billiard balls, and a circular pool table as a closed time-like curve.

Imagine a bunch of billiard balls laid out across that circular table. If you push one ball from position X, it bangs around the table, hitting others in a particular pattern. 

The researchers calculated that even if you mess with the ball's pattern at some point in its journey, future interactions with other balls can correct its path, leading it to come back to the same position and speed that it would have had you not interfered.

"Regardless of the choice, the ball will fall into the same place," Dr Yasunori Nomura, a theoretical physicist at UC Berkeley, told Business Insider.

scientists time travel

Tobar's model, in other words, says you could travel back in time, but you couldn't change how events unfolded significantly enough to alter the future, Nomura said. Applied to the grandfather paradox, then, this would mean that something would always get in the way of your attempt to kill your grandfather. Or at least by the time he did die, your grandmother would already be pregnant with your mother. 

Back to the coronavirus example. Let's say you were to travel back to 2019 and intervene in patient zero's life. According to Tobar's line of thinking, the pandemic would still happen somehow.

"You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would," Tobar told the University of Queensland.

Nomura said that although the model is too simple to represent the full range of cause and effect in our universe, it's a good starting point for future physicists.  

SEE ALSO: According to Stephen Hawking, backward time travel is not necessarily physically impossible

DON'T MISS: Scientists Come Up Empty-Handed After Online Search For Time Travelers From The Future

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NOW WATCH: There are 2 types of time travel and physicists agree that one of them is possible

Physicists made a superconductor that works at room temperature. It could one day give rise to high-speed floating trains.

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Superconductors – materials that transport electricity with no energy lost – have until now only worked at extremely cold temperatures, from about -100 degrees Fahrenheit to the near-absolute zero of space. But this month, that changed.

In a study published October 14, a team of researchers described a superconductor they engineered, which works at 59 degrees Fahrenheit. The material is composed of carbon, sulfur, and hydrogen, so is appropriately called carbonaceous sulfur hydride.

Physicists had previously found that a combination of hydrogen and sulfur worked as a superconductor under intense pressure and at -94 degrees Fahrenheit. With the addition of carbon, the team was able to create a material that worked at a higher temperature.

Ranga Dias, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Rochester, told Business Insider that they did so by "chemically compressing instead of mechanically compressing" the material. In other words, they made a denser material by adding carbon and sulfur atoms into a pre-existing network of hydrogen atoms.

Superconductivity_Lab

So far, Dias said, his team has only been able to create tiny specks of the superconductor material, about the size of ink-jet particles. The specks are made under almost 40 million pounds per square inch of pressure, almost the pressure in Earth's inner core. They only function as superconductors under that level of pressure, too. 

"Somebody can argue that, 'so you went from one extreme to another extreme,'" Dias said.

However, he added, now that it's clear a superconductor can function at room temperature, the researchers can start tinkering with their material to make it work at ordinary pressure levels. 

If they succeed, superconductors could become widespread – potentially causing dramatic advances in technology by making electricity faster, cheaper, and more powerful.

What a superconducting society would look like 

Electrical currents are flows of electrons that move through materials. Electrons move through certain types of materials easily, including most metals. Materials that convey electricity more easily are called conductors. But electrons have a harder time moving through materials like rubber and wood, so currents that try to pass through those materials tend to weaken. These materials are called insulators.

Most electricity in the US is transported through conductors and semiconductors, which can convey electricity, but not perfectly, so some energy always gets lost. A superconductor, on the other hand, has zero resistance; electrons move freely through the material. An electric current traveling through a superconducting material doesn't weaken or dissipate. 

If superconductors could function at the range of temperatures and pressures seen above ground on Earth, they could change society as we know it, Dias said.

Magnetic lavitation

A world with widespread superconductors, he said, could save society billions of dollars on electricity per year. It could also have high-speed trains that would float above magnetic tracks. 

This is because the movement of electrons creates a magnetic field. In a superconductor, some freely moving electrons move toward the surface, pushing the material's magnetic field outward. That repels other magnetic fields, so when a superconductor meets a magnet, the two objects will push against each other. 

In the case of a train, a superconducting material on the car's underside could repel magnetic tracks below it. 

Superconductors that function at normal temperatures and pressures could also give rise to computers so powerful that they'd make our most compact, advanced machines today look like the room-sized IBM computers of the 1950s and 60s. 

ibm 1401 computer

But first, Dias and his colleagues are trying to figure out whether the hydrogen compounds they studied could be made "meta-stable"– that is, whether they could stay in solid form after they're created under pressure, even once that pressure is removed.

Diamonds, the form carbon takes after being subjected to extreme pressure, are examples of meta-stable materials on Earth. Even after they are brought to ambient pressure levels, diamonds last for millions or billions of years (before eventually reverting to graphite). Researchers have figured out how to grow diamonds in a lab; Dias hopes they could do the same with a meta-stable version of the superconductor they created. 

To work towards that goal, Dias and his study co-author, Ashkan Salamat, formed a startup called Unearthly Materials. The company is currently raising funds for further superconductivity research. 

"Hopefully the next two, three years are going to be exciting," Dias said.

Even if the team's material doesn't work without added pressure, their findings could catalyze a flood of new developments in relation to superconductors, according to Russell Hemley, a professor of chemistry and physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"This may be just a tip of the iceberg of a broader set of discoveries," Hemley told The New York Times.

SEE ALSO: Solar power could become cheaper and more efficient thanks to a new method that creates electricity from invisible light

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NOW WATCH: China made an artificial star that's 6 times as hot as the sun, and it could be the future of energy

A professional drifter explains the physics behind drifting

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Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Drifting, the most exhilarating and mesmerizing exhibition of style and control while driving a car. Drifting is graceful, simple even, in appearance. But inside the car, there is a riot of activity as the driver wrestles with steering angle, braking, and wheel speed to throw the car in an unnatural position: sideways. For those of us that haven't had a chance to push a car to its limit, drifting is hard to comprehend. So we reached out to an expert for help.

Leona Chin: Why do people drift? You want to just demonstrate the supreme car control in showing that you can drive better and more spectacularly than the guy next to you. Think of drifting like an art. Drifting is like dancing. People judge you by how nice you did the dance and how good the angles of your drifting skills are.

Narrator: That's Leona Chin. She's a decorated motorsports veteran of over 10 years with experience in rally, circuit racing, endurance racing, gymkhana, autocross, drag, off-road, and go-kart. She's the driver behind mega-viral prank videos and the Most Inspiring Female Motorsports Athlete as voted by the Motorsports Association of Malaysia. To those who know of her motoring exploits, she goes by another name: the Queen of Drift.

Leona helped us understand how drifting works from a science perspective.

Leona: According to Newton's first law is the law of inertia that states that when an object is moving, it wants to keep moving the same way, and it resists any changes to that motion unless there is an external force causing a change. Thus, in this case, the car's natural tendency is to go straight. When the car's steering wheel is turned, then there is an external force.

Narrator: That force is the friction between the tires and the track, also called traction. When you turn the wheels, some of that traction is angled perpendicular to the car's velocity. So instead of moving in a straight line, the car begins to follow a curved path. But this is not drifting. This is what happens during a normal turn.

So when does a turn into a drift? When you overcome the friction between your tires and the road. And you do that by entering a curve at an unusually sharp angle or an abnormally high speed. Think of a car moving on a surface where the force of friction is very low, like on ice. A driver may turn their tires in order to avoid an obstacle like a stopped car, but the traction between the ice and the tires is so low that it's easy to overcome it. The car is in a slide.

The same thing happens when a driver takes a curve too sharp or too fast on an asphalt racetrack.

Now, a regular driver probably wouldn't know what to do during a slide and would likely lose control and go off the road. But professionals like Leona Chin can turn that slide into a drift by taking back control of the car. How? By turning the driving wheel in the opposite direction of the bend. Turning the wheel changes the direction of the friction force from the skid. That can change the direction of the skid itself. And if you know exactly how fast to hit the curve and exactly how to turn the steering wheel, you'll make drifting look easy. Even though it's anything but.

Leona: So simply put, you need to balance the amount of traction you lose on the rear wheels and balance the wheel speed and slide constantly through a drift.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published in June 2019.

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Here's what would happen if you tried to dig to China

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  • To dig to China, you'd need to start your journey from Chile or Argentina — the location of China's antipode (or opposite point on Earth).  
  • You would need a super-powered drill to get through rock and metal within Earth's three layers.
  • First, there's the Earth's crust. It's the thinnest of three main layers, yet humans have never drilled all the way through it.
  • Then, the mantle makes up a whopping 84% of the planet's volume.
  • At the inner core, you'd have to drill through solid iron. This would be especially difficult because there's near-zero gravity at the core. 
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: If you want to get to the opposite end of the world, it's a hike. About 20,000 kilometers. But what if you didn't have to travel across the surface? What if you could dig straight through to the other side?

If you're trying to dig to China from the US, there's something you should know first. The opposite point on the planet isn't in China. It's somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. So, to get to China, you should start digging in either Argentina or Chile.

Your first challenge would be digging through the Earth's crust. It's the thinnest of Earth's three main layers, yet humans have never drilled all the way through it. As you descend, you'd soon reach the depth of the Paris Catacombs, the deepest metro station, and the devil worm, the deepest animal we've ever discovered underground.

Then, it would start to get hot. At 4,000 meters down, you'd pass the deepest mine on the planet, which is cooled with ice to make workers comfortable, because, down here, temperatures are 60 degrees Celsius. By 8,800 meters, you'll be as deep as Mt. Everest is tall, but it's still not the deepest point humans have ever dug. That point is at the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole, at 12,260 meters below the surface. Down here, there's 4,000 times more pressure than at sea level, and temperatures push 180 degrees Celsius, so you'd need a lot of insulation to carry on and keep from melting.

At around 40,000 meters, you'd reach Earth's second and largest layer, the mantle, which makes up a whopping 84% of the planet's volume. Near the border, temperatures climb to around 1,000 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt many metals, like silver, but not a steel drill. And good thing because you'll need it to drill through the first part of the mantle, which is made of solid rock, until you reach 100,000 meters, that is, when you might need to switch to a propeller.

Here, the pressure and temperature are so high that, in some places, rock takes on a caramel-like consistency. In fact, it's this rock that ultimately erupts from volcanoes on the surface. At 150,000 meters, keep your eyes peeled for diamonds. They form when heat and pressure restructure the carbon atoms in this region. Once you reach 410,000 meters, the rock is solid again, so it's back to the drill. You see, while it's still plenty hot at this depth to melt rock, the pressure is so extreme that the molecules inside literally can't move into a liquid state.

Then, by 3 million meters down, you'd reach Earth's third layer, the outer core. Unlike Earth's crust and mantle, the core is made of iron and nickel. Temperatures here are the same as the surface of the sun, hot enough to melt all that metal, so, yep, back to the propeller. And it would have to be made out of some kind of supermaterial, because no known element has a melting point above 6,000 degrees Celsius. Making matters worse, the outer core also has low gravity, because, when you're that deep, much of the planet's mass is now above you, which produces a gravitational force that pulls away from the center. So to continue, you'd need a super heat- and pressure-proof submarine that moves like rockets in space by shooting fuel out the back end.

You'd soon arrive at the inner core, around 5 million meters below the surface. The inner core is one giant sphere of solid iron, so it would definitely be challenging to get through. But if you did find a way, you'd soon hit the halfway point, about 6.4 million meters down, also known as the center of the Earth. Now, there's nearly the same amount of mass all around you, pulling you equally in all directions, so there's zero gravity here.

And now is when the trip really gets hard. The second half. Because as you dig past the inner core, you'd soon feel the pull of gravity again. And this time, it'd be pulling you from above, where the majority of Earth's mass is now. So while you might be digging down, relative to where you started, it'll feel like you're climbing up. And if you didn't have those handy rockets propelling you, you'd fall right back to the core. But 6.4 million meters later, after powering through impenetrable iron, molten alloy, and solid and mushy rock, you'd arrive, at long last, on the other side, in China.

That would certainly come as a relief, but it wouldn't even be the best part. Assuming you left a tunnel through the center of the Earth behind you, you'd now be able to travel back and forth between China and Argentina in under an hour, simply by jumping in. To learn why, check out another video we made about jumping through the center of the Earth.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published in July 2019.

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1,033 people sent us ideas on how to dislodge the Ever Given ship from the Suez Canal. Here are 19 of our favorite.

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Last week, we laid an offer down on the table: Sure, send in your weird idea to dislodge the Ever Given container ship from the Suez Canal — what could go wrong?

I received 1,033 emails in the course of three days. Exactly 6% of them said something to the nature of "destroy the Ever Given."

The rest, from some of the finest engineering minds in the world, laid out comprehensive proposals to extricate the container ship from its unfortunate harbor.

Now clearly these methods will not be necessary given the successful efforts to remove the ship from the Suez on Monday.

However, like any skunkworks, it's our obligation for posterity to share the innovative approaches lest we find ourselves in a similar position yet again.

Here's a representative group of the ideas our pop-up maritime think tank provided. The world is forever in your debt, and my inbox is just as jammed as the Suez was before the big boat was finally dislodged.

Michael Scherr

Time for a mining engineer to show you boat nerds how this is done. when you are dealing with big things that have suction pressure you need more big things. suction pressure is what you feel when you step in mud with a boot. you need to get a fleet of backhoes down there to start trenching the mud and sediment away from that bow of the ship. you are going to need a lot and you are going to have to dispose of the spoil. once the suction pressure is released the tugs should be able to reflect the ship. all I see tho are boat nerds in the water. this is now a land based operation so let the mine engineers do mine engineering things.

Liam Neane

[Editor's note: Liam was kind enough to send in a fairly comprehensive PowerPoint, however, these two slides alone will give you the gist]

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Nathan Anders 

Salt will increase the density of the water under and around the Ever Given. This could make the vessel rise high enough to dislodge. A potentially stupendous amount of salt may have this effect. The salt would be added to the Suez Canal near the Ever Given, as much as needed

Margaret Garcia

Dig under the boat in multiple areas. This will clear way for some sort of machinery to go underneath the boat and through to the other side to possible pull/push/drag the boat. Or give room for any type of machinery to do anything else like possibly lifting it? I have attached some very poorly done diagrams.

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Richard Helke

Egypt has a bunch of obsolete Cold War-era Soviet fighter aircraft, most of which are probably broken.  However, surely they can salvage a few working jet engines off of those broken aircraft.  Then, you attach one to the front end of the ship and one to the back end, as indicated in the attached PowerPoint.  Fire the engines briefly, enough to generate some thrust and get the ship floating back toward the centerline of the canal.  Obviously, don't fire the engines too long, or else you'd just get the ship stuck in the opposite direction.

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Sinéad Baker, Insider news reporter

Put slippy banana skins in a u shape so the boat can easily be pulled out and back into the water! 

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Bernard Deschner

Pump liquid nitrogen under the boat for  about ¾ of the length( in the center of the length), whereas the Ice formation under the boat will lift it up enough to tug it (spin it free).

E. Christian Trejo

The weight of the boat is 200,000 tons. A MIL-Mi 26 Russian helicopter can lift 22 tons. You just need a perfectly synchronized flight of 9,000 helicopters. You better position the helicopters in different height levels and angles to avoid accidents

Gabriel P.

The Ever Given is clearly permanently stuck in the Suez. No way around that... unless we build a bridge around it...The Belgians have already rumbled how to do this, as shone in the picture of the Pont du Sart Aqueduct.

Suez

Our only recourse to open up the shipping artery is to build a similar bridge over the beached Ever Given. As you can see in the attached schematic, this would be easy, cheap, and probably completed by the end of the weekend. Any liability issues with the likely loss of shipping containers at the waterfall or balloon stages of the bridge would have already been faced by shipping lines, who frequently lose things overboard. I hope you and the Suez Authority find my design helpful.

Leigh Haugen

Soil Liquefaction via the sequential detonation of explosive charges buried in the ground on both sides along with simultaneous force applied on both sides via tugboats…

Sophie Rose

Freeze the boat to make the metal smaller. Then move the boat

Kim Steins

I think they should just take it apart, piece by piece, and then reassemble it somewhere else. Like the way you'd put the dean's car in his office

Charles Frederick 

suez idea

suez ideasuez idea

Andy Kiersz, Insider Quantitative Editor

dig a new side canal around it (looks like mostly just desert over to the right of the boat, should be fine) and leave the boat there as a testament to the hubris of man

Andy Kiersz canal pitch

Samuel Hamilton McBride 

I would simply tie a bunch of ropes to it and get a ton of people to physically drag the ship free, Fitzcarraldo style. I have to assume Werner Herzog is available to consult on this.

Jason Horwitz

Ok, here's my idea based on an engineering background and having read almost no details about the stuck boat.
1) Start pumping water from the canal INTO the boat's hull. This will greatly increase the weight of the boat and cause it to sink further into the mud/ dirt/ clay at the bottom of the canal. (Note this is worthless if the canal is just rock. Which it might be. Who knows?)

2) Then, pump all of that water back out, while also removing as much of the cargo as possible (they could use those cool heavy lift helicopters). This will now cause the boat to want to float up probably quite a good distance.
This would be the sinking/ floating equivalent of "jimmying" the boat free.

Jared Mukina

I don't know what has been tried nor do I know all the details about the situation, but here is my idea. Create two whirlpools on each side of the vessel. Have a means to control these whirlpools so that the vessel does not over correct and become wedged 180 degrees around on the other side. Might have to make some big whirlpools. How would these whirlpools be create? idk, but I have some ideas. My theory is the combined force between the two whirlpools on the vessel should allow it to become unwedged. These whirlpools might also create water level rise for the vessel to lift off the ground that has beached the Ever Given. If this sounds like a winner contact me for more details.

Tsunami Films

1. Inflatable Barricade retains water on both sides of the ship into a makeshift lock system.
2. Water Pump Boats (or Shore Water Pumps) water into barricaded lock.
3. Water lifts ship by increasing float.
4. Ship is pushed and pulled from sand.
5. Lock opens on one side to float ship away.

ArchimedesPrinciple_animation

Tim Woodard

this is probably really dumb and wouldn't work but just get a crapton of like tug boats and have them pull/push the sides in opposite directions as they continue to remove dirt and stuff

Far from being dumb, Tim, this is what they actually did, and successfully so. Congratulations to Tim Woodard for solving the Suez problem.

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University of Chicago astrophysicists just released an algorithm to detect the 'emotional trends in the repertoire of Taylor Swift'

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Two physicists from the University of Chicago released an in-depth report on Thursday outlining an algorithm that they developed to analyze 149 Taylor Swift songs to decode the award-winning singer's emotions over the past 14 years.

The report, titled "I Knew You Were Trouble: Emotional Trends in the Repertoire of Taylor Swift," was published on arXiv, a prominent online repository for papers on math, science, and artificial intelligence. And despite the fact that it was released on April Fools' Day, the research and data that went into this paper are real.

Researchers Megan Mansfield, a Ph.D. student studying astrophysics, and Darryl Seligman, a postdoctoral researcher, looked at all of the "Willow" singer's creative output — excluding holiday music, covers, and songs where she was not the lead singer. A total of nine hours, 43 minutes, and six seconds of music were analyzed to assess the happiness of Taylor Swift as reflected in each song, as well as the strength of her relationships.

Their algorithm specifically analyzes Taylor Swift's feelings toward "the Male in Question" in each song, otherwise referred to in the paper as the MIQ. Notably, the MIQ is not always male — or even human. In some songs, the MIQ refers to New York City, friends such as Selena Gomez, or often-rivals such as Katy Perry.

The level of happiness or sadness Swift feels in each song was graded according to four criteria: how Swift feels about herself in a song, her outlook on life in the song, how happy or sad she is in a song, and the beats per minute.

The researchers found a few interesting trends in their analysis. As you may expect, Swift is happier in stronger relationships, but the analysis also turned up quirkier suggestions — for example, Swift appears to be unhappier in relationships with partners who have blue eyes.

The researchers also developed a tool called "taylorswift" that's written in Python and allows users to enter details about their current emotions and relationship status to receive a list of five Taylor Swift songs that are appropriate for their mood.

Mansfield, one of the paper's coauthors, said that her experience with math, statistics, and using the Hubble telescope helped her make these musical discoveries. The researchers emphasized that this is not a peer-reviewed paper, and while the algorithmic science behind it may be valid, it's not intended to be a major contribution to computer science.

"This is kind of a joke in the astronomy community. The website that we posted it on is a real website for serious science papers as well, and people post their research there all the time so that everyone can access it freely," Mansfield said. "And there's a kind of a tradition that on April Fools', people post funny papers."

Representatives for Swift were not immediately available for comment.

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A new experiment has broken the known rules of physics, hinting at a mysterious, unknown force that has shaped our universe

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One of the most ubiquitous subatomic particles in the universe, the muon, seems to be misbehaving.

Or at least, it isn't behaving the way physicists expect. In fact, muons are deviating so much from what the laws of physics suggest that scientists are beginning to think their playbook is either incomplete, or there's some force in the universe we don't yet know about.

Muons are like fat electrons: They have a negative charge but are 207 times heavier than electrons. Thanks to their charge and a property known as spin, they act like tiny magnets. So when muons are immersed in another magnetic field, they experience an infinitesimal wobble.

But in a study released this week, physicists at the Fermilab in Illinois reported a discrepancy between how much muons should be wobbling and how much they actually did wobble during a lab experiment.

The difference is substantial enough that many scientists are convinced particles or forces we haven't yet discovered must be involved. The finding, in other words, offers new evidence that something mysterious has played a role in shaping our universe — something that's missing from the existing rules of physics.

"In this respect, the new measurement could indeed mark the start of a revolution of our understanding of nature," Thomas Teubner, a theoretical physicist from the University of Liverpool and co-author of the new study, told Insider. 

It's possible that this unknown phenomenon is also linked to dark matter, the shadowy cousin of matter that was created just after the Big Bang and makes up a quarter of the universe.

Shooting muons in a circle at the speed of light

When cosmic rays penetrate Earth's atmosphere, they create muons. Several hundred muons strike your head every second. They can penetrate objects like an X-ray does — a few years ago, scientists used muons to discover a hidden chamber in Egypt's Great Pyramid — but the particles only last for two-millionths of a second. After that, they decay into clusters of lighter particles.

During its brief existence, each muon remains oriented around a single point, in the same way a compass always points north. But when it encounters a magnetic field, a muon's orientation shifts slightly away from that point. That crucial wobble, known as the g-factor, is what the Fermilab experiment is examining. 

brookhaven fermilab magnet

Fermilab is a US Department of Energy project with ties to the University of Chicago that's devoted to the study of particle physics.

Scientists there can produce muons for study by running a beam of protons super quickly into metal using a particle accelerator. So the researchers behind the new study took these muons and funneled them inside a circular electromagnet 50 feet in diameter. The muons then traveled at nearly the speed of light around the circle more than 1,000 times.

When muons in the machine decay, ultra-sensitive detectors can measure which direction the resulting smaller particles are moving. Physicists can then use that information to calculate where each muon's fixed point is.

fermilab

It should be possible to calculate the precise amount muons will wobble using the Standard Model of physics, which encompasses everything we know about particles' behavior. But the Fermilab team found that their muons' wobble did not match those expectations.

Instead, it was off by one-third of one-millionth of a percent.

That difference may seem mind-bogglingly small, but Teubner said it's actually "a milestone for particle physics." 

And it's unlikely to be the result of error: The team found that there's only a 1 in 40,000 chance the discrepancy in their measurement was due to random chance. 

"This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory," Renee Fatemi, one of the Fermilab muon experiment managers, said in a press release.

A 20-year mystery

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This isn't the first time muons have not behaved in the way science's best theories would predict. 

In 2001, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York ran a similar experiment using the same giant electromagnet. Those results also showed that muons' wobble in the lab deviated from what it should have been. But those findings had a smaller statistical significance than Fermilab's: There was a 1 in 1,000 chance it could have been a fluke.

Now, the Fermilab results confirm what Brookhaven physicists discovered 20 years ago — and that "has made the discrepancy which was already seen with the old result more intriguing," Teubner said.

Fermilab is expected to release data from two more similar experiments within the next two years. A fourth experiment is also already underway, and fifth is in the works.

Whatever is influencing muons could have a link to dark matter

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According to Teubner, it's possible that some force that's not in the Standard Model of physics could explain the muons' whack-a-doo wobbles.

That force, he said, may also explain the existence of dark matter, and possibly even dark energy — which plays a key role in accelerating the expansion of the universe. 

"Theorists would find it appealing to solve more than one problem at once," Teubner said.

One hypothesis that could apply to both muons and dark matter, he added, is that muons and all other particles have almost identical partner particles that weakly interact with them. This concept is known as supersymmetry.

But Fermilab's existing technologies aren't sensitive enough to test that idea. Plus, Teubner added, it's could be the case that the mysterious influence on muons isn't linked to dark matter at all — which would mean the rules of physics are inadequate in more ways than one.

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How this cat survived a 32-story fall

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Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: 32 stories above the streets of New York City, a cat fell from a window and lived. After vets treated the cat's chipped tooth and collapsed lungs, the feline was sent home two days later.

Cats fall a lot, and they've gotten really good at it. Drop a cat upside down, for example, and it will almost always land on its feet. That's because cats are extremely flexible. They can twist their bodies mid-air as they fall.

But landing feet first isn't always the best strategy. Like if you're falling from 32 stories up. To figure out how cats manage that perfect landing every time, a series of studies looked at over a 100 cats' falls from two to 32 stories up.

Comes as no surprise that cats who fell from the second floor had fewer injuries than cats who fell from the sixth floor. But here is the fascinating part. Above the seventh story, the extent of the injuries largely stayed the same, no matter how high the cats fell. So, how is that possible?

Well, it all comes down to acrobatics or lack thereof. Cats that fell from two to seven stories up mostly landed feet first. Above that, however, cats used a different technique. Instead of positioning their legs straight down as they fell, they splayed out like a parachuter. And landed belly-first instead.

But this method isn't 100% foolproof. Chest trauma, like a collapsed lung, or broken rib is more common with this landing method. But the risk of breaking a leg is much less. So, how do cats somehow subconsciously know how to land?

It has to do with a physics phenomenon called terminal velocity. At first, the cat plummets faster and faster under gravity until she's fallen the equivalent of five stories. At that point, she hits constant terminal velocity at 100 kilometers per hour. She's now in free fall where air friction counteracts her acceleration under gravity. At this point, she's no longer accelerating and, more importantly, doesn't feel the pull from gravity.

So, here's what researchers think is happening. From two to seven stories up, cats don't have enough time to reach terminal velocity and prep for landing feet first. But once they hit terminal velocity, their instinct changes and they parachute their limbs.

All that said, don't throw your cat out of a window. I can't believe I have to say this. Not only is it still very dangerous, it's not very polite. Don't throw your cat out the window just to see all that go down. Just watch this video again. Just hit the little replay button.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published in October 2018.

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A YouTuber bet a physicist $10,000 that a wind-powered vehicle could travel twice as fast as the wind itself — and won

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When Derek Muller took an experimental land yacht for a spin this spring, he wasn't aiming to stir up scientific controversy. He certainly wasn't trying to win $10,000 in a bet.

Muller, the creator of the Veritasium YouTube channel, likes to break down funky science concepts for his 9.5 million subscribers. So in May, he published a video about a vehicle called Blackbird that runs on wind power.

Created by Rick Cavallaro, a former aerospace engineer, Blackbird is unique because it can move directly downwind faster than the wind itself for a sustained period. Any sailor worth their salt can tell you that a boat can travel faster than the wind by cutting zigzag patterns; that's called tacking. But the idea that a vehicle can beat the breeze traveling straight downwind, no tacking involved, is controversial.

"I knew this was a counterintuitive problem. To be perfectly honest with you, when I went out to pilot the craft, I didn't understand how it worked," Muller told Insider.

Blackbird is so counterintuitive, in fact, that less than a week after Muller released his video (below), Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics at UCLA, emailed to inform him that it had to be wrong. A vehicle like that would break the laws of physics, Kusenko said.

"I said, 'Look, if you don't believe this, let's put some money on this,'" Muller said. He suggested a wager of $10,000, never imagining Kusenko would take it.

But Kusenko agreed, and in the weeks that followed, they exchanged data and argued about Blackbird. They even brought in several of science's biggest names, including Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, to help decide who was right.

In the end, Muller emerged victorious.

'I never saw a way I could lose'

faster than the wind vehicle

Days after Muller suggested the wager, Kusenko sent him a document with the bet's terms, Muller said.

"Everything was always super airtight, I never saw a way I could lose," Muller said.

But Kusenko was equally confident. "Thanks to the laws of physics, I am not risking anything,"Kusenko told Vice last month. He did not respond to Insider's request for comment.

Kusenko gave Muller an hourlong presentation explaining why he was certain the YouTuber had been taken in by bad science. The professor said Blackbird was most likely taking advantage of intermittent wind gusts that helped the vehicle speed up. He outlined his objections on a page of his UCLA website, though it has since been taken down.

For his part, Muller sent Kusenko data from one of Blackbird's driving tests in his video, which was filmed in the El Mirage lake bed. During that drive, Blackbird accelerated over two minutes — a feat that would have been impossible if it had relied on sporadic gusts.

The vehicle reached a speed of 27.7 mph in a 10-mph tailwind.

Muller even contracted Xyla Foxlin, a fellow YouTuber, to build a model cart similar to Blackbird that could be tested on a treadmill. Indeed, Foxlin showed that her wind-powered model could go faster than the wind.

Muller documented this back-and-forth in a follow-up video (below) that he released in June.

"Kusenko was so sure he was right. He wanted to make it public," Muller said.

How Blackbird works

In 2010, Google and Joby Energy sponsored Cavallaro and a team of collaborators from San Jose State University to build Blackbird. The team demonstrated that the vehicle could travel downwind 2.8 times as fast as the wind, a record confirmed by the North American Land Sailing Association.

The secret to Blackbird, Cavallaro explained, is that once the wind gets the vehicle going, its wheels start to turn the propeller blades — they're connected to the blades by a chain. As the vehicle speeds up, its wheels turn the propeller faster and faster. The propeller blades, in turn, act as a fan, pushing more air behind the land yacht and thrusting it forward.

rick cavallero faster than the wind vehicle

"I never even imagined a decade later that a physics professor would still be arguing how it's impossible," Cavallaro, a chief scientist at Sportvision, told Insider.

After three weeks of debate, Kusenko acknowledged that Blackbird could go slightly faster than the wind, but he maintained that it was for only short periods. If a gust of wind sped up the land yacht and then quickly died down, he said, it would appear that Blackbird was traveling faster than wind.

"The resolution of our bet was not as clean as I'd hoped," Muller said. "Kusenko coughed up the 10 grand, let's leave it at that."

faster than the wind vehicle

Cavallaro, too, wanted more acknowledgment of his vehicle's capabilities.

Kusenko "conceded on a technicality — that the vehicle moves marginally faster than the wind temporarily," Cavallaro said. "I offered him another $10,000 bet, because his technicality is entirely wrong, but I know I won't be hearing from him."

Muller's two videos have each garnered at least 6.8 million views and 41,000 comments, with many agreeing with Kusenko that it's impossible for Blackbird to go faster than the wind. Someviewers have even asked the YouTuber if he'd make follow-up wagers.

"It breaks a lot of people's brains," Muller said. "Clearly it got Kusenko too."

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