EverythingScience

We need to talk about school start times Delaying school start times could help teenagers sleep better giving them a better chance for success. Researchers have found that students from schools that started earlier slept less, were less likely to meet the national sleep recommendations for their age were more often tired in the morning. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

Use stars’ own light to park tiny spacecraft at an exoplanet It’s all very well dreaming up technologies that will let us travel quickly to other star systems, but how do we apply the brakes on arrival? Rene Heller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and independent space researcher Michael Hippke now have an answer: we can slow down a solar sail-powered craft using the stars themselves. The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is over four light years away. Chemical propulsion technologies are too heavy to be practical – they would take 100,000 years to get there. However, lasers fired from Earth can accelerate ultra-light solar sails made from graphene to around 20 per cent of the speed of light within a few minutes. That means an interstellar probe could reach the Alpha Centauri system – including the Earth-mass planet orbiting its companion star, Proxima Centauri – just 20 years after launch. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

Could Wormholes Really Work? Probably Not Ah, wormholes. The intergalactic shortcut. A tunnel through space-time that allows intrepid travelers to hop from star system to star system without ever coming close to the speed of light. Wormholes are a workhorse of sci-fi interstellar civilizations in books and on the screen because they solve the annoying problem of "Well, if we stuck to known physics, 99.99999 percent of the story would be as fascinating as watching people sleep." Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

Long-lost continent found submerged deep under Indian Ocean An ancient continent that was once sandwiched between India and Madagascar now lies scattered on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The first clues to the continent’s existence came when some parts of the Indian Ocean were found to have stronger gravitational fields than others, indicating thicker crusts. One theory was that chunks of land had sunk and become attached to the ocean crust below. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

AI just won a poker tournament against professional players An AI just claimed another gaming victory over humans by winning a 20-day poker tournament. The AI, called Libratus, took on four of the world’s best Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em poker players at a Pennsylvania casino. After 120,000 hands, Libratus won with a lead of over $1.7 million in chips. “I’m feeling great,” says Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who was part of the team that created the AI. “This is a David versus Goliath story, and Libratus was able to throw a pebble.” Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

An unexplained 'void' appears to be pushing the Milky Way through the Universe at 2 million km/h You can’t feel it, but our planet is orbiting the Sun at speeds of roughly 100,000 km/h (62,000 mph), and something is making our Milky Way galaxy move through the Universe at more than 2 million km/h (1.2 million mph). That’s 630 km per second, and now scientists might have finally figured out why. In front of us, there's a dense supercluster of galaxies some 650 million light-years away called the Shapley Concentration, and it's pulling us towards it. Behind us, scientists have found evidence of a previously unknown region of space that's almost entirely devoid of galaxies, and it's pushing us away with incredible force. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

This could be the first observational evidence that our early Universe was once a hologram For decades, scientists have been toying with the idea that our Universe is - or once was - a giant hologram, where the laws of physics require just two dimensions, but everything appears three-dimensional to us. As you can imagine, it's not an easy hypothesis to prove, but physicists say they now have observational evidence from the early Universe that fits just as neatly into the so-called hologram principle as it does with the standard Big Bang model. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

One of our oldest ancestors has been discovered, and it had a big mouth and no butt Palaeontologists have added another snapshot to our ancestral family album with the discovery of one of the oldest fossils that can be linked to human ancestry. The researchers analysed 45 fossils roughly the size and shape of a grain of rice found in sedimentary rock from China’s Shaanxi province, and determined that they belonged to an as-yet-undescribed species of animal that's distantly related to humans. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

These Powerful Blazars Are the Most Distant Ever Seen Monster black holes shooting jets of gamma-ray radiation right at us have been spotted farther away than ever before, dating back to when the universe was nearly one-tenth its current age. The five distant objects, called gamma-ray blazars, deepen the mystery of how black holes so large could have formed so early in the universe's history. Article @EverythingScience @ESHub

Possible sign of dark matter shows up again A strange X-ray signal has popped up again in new measurements, raising hopes that it could be a sign of dark matter. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveal an excess of X-rays at a particular energy, creating a bump on a plot, scientists report online at arXiv.org on January 29. The X-ray “line,” as it is known, could reveal the presence of dark matter — an unknown substance that scientists believe constitutes most of the matter in the cosmos. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

Earth’s magnetic poles are set to swap places - and we're totally unprepared Earth’s magnetic field surrounds our planet like an invisible force field - protecting life from harmful solar radiation by deflecting charged particles away. Far from being constant, this field is continuously changing. Indeed, our planet’s history includes at least several hundred global magnetic reversals, where north and south magnetic poles swap places. So when’s the next one happening and how will it affect life on Earth? Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

Hyperloop stream now Live! Watch here Over the last week, 27 teams have been on site at SpaceX in preparation for this weekend’s Hyperloop Pod Competition just outside SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, CA. The purpose of the competition is to help accelerate the development of a functional Hyperloop prototype and encourage student innovation by challenging university students to design and build the best Hyperloop pod. This competition is the first of its kind anywhere in the world— teams have put their pods through a litany of tests over the last week in hopes of making it into the Hyperloop test track itself. via reddit @EverythingScience @ESHUB @SpaceX

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Physicists have found a metal that conducts electricity but not heat Researchers have identified a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat - an incredibly useful property that defies our current understanding of how conductors work. The metal contradicts something called the Wiedemann-Franz Law, which basically states that good conductors of electricity will also be proportionally good conductors of heat, which is why things like motors and appliances get so hot when you use them regularly. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

NASA 'Cuts Live Feed From ISS' Again After Another 'Alien' Sighting Has NASA tried to cover up another alien sighting? UFO conspiracy theorists believe so but how true are these allegations? John Craddick, an alien hunter from Wolverhampton, said that he was watching the live feeds from NASA's International Space Station (ISS) for years and hasn't seen anything extraordinary. However, on January 20, he was teaching his friend how to use the live feed when he spotted what appeared to be a UFO. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

Astronomers measure universe expansion, get hints of 'new physics' stronomers have just made a new measurement of the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding, and it doesn't quite line up with a different estimate of the same number. That discrepancy could hint at "new physics" beyond the standard model of cosmology, according to the team, which includes physicists from the University of California, Davis, that made the observation. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

Planet Earth makes its own water from scratch deep in the mantle Our planet may be blue from the inside out. Earth’s huge store of water might have originated via chemical reactions in the mantle, rather than arriving from space through collisions with ice-rich comets. This new water may be under such pressure that it can trigger earthquakes hundreds of kilometres below Earth’s surface – tremors whose origins have so far remained unexplained. That’s the upshot of a computer simulation of reactions in Earth’s upper mantle between liquid hydrogen and quartz, the most common and stable form of silica in this part of the planet. Article @EverythingScience @ESHUB

Shooting electron waves through plasma could reveal if black holes permanently destroy information One of the greatest dilemmas in astrophysics is the black hole paradox - if black holes really do destroy every scrap of information that enters them. Now, physicists might have finally come up with a way to test the paradox once and for all, by accelerating a wave of negatively charged electrons through a cloud of plasma. Article @EverythingScience @ESHub

DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING IS JUST A CONSPIRACY THEORY AND IS NOT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY A doomsday asteroid will hit Earth next month and trigger devastating mega-tsunamis, claims conspiracy theorist Last year Nasa detected an object, that could be a comet or an asteroid, on a path towards Earth. The space agency has said the mysterious object will safely pass Earth at a distance of nearly 32 million miles (51 million kilometres) on February 25th. But one self-proclaimed astronomer has come up with an alternative theory, suggesting the asteroid will crash into Earth on February 16th and trigger a mega-tsunami, according to reports. Article @EverythingScience @ESHub

Lights Out: Asteroid Triggered Freezing Darkness That Killed Dinos When a giant asteroid careened into Earth about 66 million years ago, the enormous collision led to the formation of an airborne "curtain" of sulfate molecules that blocked the sun's light and led to years of freezing cold and darkness, a new study finds. The finding shows how these droplets, or aerosols, of sulfuric acid formed high in the atmosphere, and likely contributed to the deaths of 75 percent of all animals on Earth, including nonavian dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and long-necked sauropods, the researchers said. Article @EverythingScience