When the materials scientist Ross Colman and colleagues read a preprint claiming that a material called LK-99 is a superconductor at room temperature and ambient pressure, they set out to replicate the result in their lab. But unlike other scientists doing the same thing, Colman’s group decided to share their work with the public in real time. In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, Colman – who is at Czechia’s Charles University – talks about the challenges of trying to reproduce someone else’s research and why the team was unable to replicate the observation of room temperature superconductivity.…
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Wide open question: binary-star observations back MOND.(Courtesy: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA)) A new study of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space mission claims to have found evidence of gravity acting contrary to the predictions of Newton and Einstein, but not everyone agrees that this is the smoking gun for a theory of modified gravity. Observations of galaxies and galaxy clusters show that the gravitational forces binding these structures together are greater than those expected from the matter they contain. This has led physicists to predict the existence of dark matter, which is a hypothetical material…
Aisha Abdel Gawad’s debut, Between Two Moons, is a striking novel about being an immigrant and Muslim in post-9/11 America, about battling the blasé of youth with the burdens of womanhood. It’s June. Muslims in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn are ready to welcome with fervor the holy month of Ramadan. Twins, Amira and Lina, are only half prepared for the hunger and thirst pangs as they are days away from graduating high school, their minds swirling with plans to make this summer count. This will be the summer of freedom, before Amira heads for college in the Fall. This will be…
There’s something inherently magical about reading in the summer. Perhaps it dates back to those formative elementary school days of furiously cataloging summer reads for the chance at winning a free personal pizza, but the words “summer” and “reading” bring only positive associations to mind. With only a few weeks of summer left, indie booksellers from across the country have submitted recommendations for their favorite 2023 beach read and are here to make sure you find the perfect book to close out your summer and capture that summer-reading-magic at least one last time. The best beach reads never sacrifice emotional…
Searching for truth, whether at personal level or on a larger scale, has been the subject of many different narratives. I started writing my novel South in 2018 when I was thinking about truth, its relationship to history, and the possibility of accessing reality amid the excess of misinformation and the erasure of historical facts. The narrator of South is a freelance journalist who is hired for a mission to investigate the labor strikes on an offshore oil rig. Soon after his arrival on the rig, he is pulled into a labyrinth of conspiracies and lies that he is not…
Teaching My Son to Swim While I Drown Megan Kamalei Kakimoto Share article Madwomen by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto My son, Toby, demands many stories, but it’s the story of the Madwoman he likes best. Because he is part Hawaiian and often forgets, I have made her the Madwoman in the Sea—some foolish attempt to right him with his ‘āina. I tuck my son into the swaddle of his trundle bed, cup the tender tissue of his cheek, which glows the shade of spoiled milk. Legend claims Her as its own manic invention—brilliant, beautiful, disillusioned, a little lonely. They say She…
Jenn Shapland has thin skin, literally. Thin Skin uses her medical diagnosis as a prism to examine the thinning of boundaries between our bodies and the world: “to be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.” Mesmerizing and carefully, dutifully written, these essays delve into the weight of capitalism, the negotiation of identity through consumerism, and the misguided and harmful weapon of white womanhood reaching back to US colonization. “This book begins in the free fall of reality,” Shapland writes early on about humanity’s exposure to radioactive…
For me, the term “mad scientist” brings to mind images of bubbling beakers filled with neon liquids; elongated, menacing silhouettes; and of course (Pinky and) the Brain. There is a long history of stories from Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau all the way to Rick and Morty where brilliance tips over into madness and we watch wide-eyed to see the damage. Science-fiction is based in reality and there is something about the possibility of real miracles or maledictions that draws us in. Frankenstein’s monster may have seemed like more of a thought experiment at the time, but is…
It was the kind of summer night we’d been craving all week. Easy conversation, endless beers, suburban life drifting on welcome breezes— “Marco?” “Polo!” screamed from a backyard pool, raucous laughter as someone’s bullshit was called out. Six of us sat in a hot tub: my boyfriend, his sister and brother-in-law, and their middle-aged neighbors. I was 23. My boyfriend and I had been cheating on one another since high school. The others were stable, in their thirties. We partied as the kids slept inside. My boyfriend and I were tourists in this land of adulthood. And like a tourist,…
Tax Incentives for the Brokenhearted Account Because I was the one to end it, and so soon, I offered to reimburse her what I owed. She had covered most of the wedding, the move, our rent. I was living on the grace of a friend, sleeping in his sunroom on Folsom. Every morning I opened my account to see how little I had left. It wasn’t looking good until she wrote to say we could forget it if I would let her claim me on her taxes. I guessed there was a rebate for this kind of thing. I could…
Why is it that, in an era of convenience and online shopping, we still go out of our way to buy our croissants and cupcakes at the mom-and-pop bakery rather than the chain supermarkets? While the custom of buying bread from the baker, meat from the butcher, and cheese from the cheesemonger is an ingrained culture in France, even ultra-pragmatic Americans fall easily for the lure of a little bakery with a pink-striped awning and a window full of toothsome treats. When I decided to write a novel about Paris, I knew instantly that it had to be set in…
In 2005, during the dawn of reality television and before social media transformed these experiments into income-generators for future influencers, I was a participant on a PBS reality television show called Texas Ranch House. Like all reality television shows, this one had its own uniquely unhinged premise: 15 strangers (or relative-strangers—five participants comprised a real-life family) “time-traveled” to 1867 Texas, where we ran a cattle ranch for three months as though it were the 19th century. I went to Texas hoping to be a ranch hand, but instead arrived to discover that I—a queer, Jewish, feminist, horse lover—had been cast…
Alexandria, 1934. The wedding of the author’s grandparents, Allegra (Freja) Berdugo and Armand (Abdu) Dayan.What of Egypt is left in the children of Egypt’s Jewish diaspora? The daughter of an immigrant reflects on what it means to be “truly Egyptian” in the context of her family’s transnational identity. When my mother is on the Mediterranean shore—usually, these days, in the comfort of a modest Tel Aviv café—there is always a moment when she turns to the water, closes her eyes, and deeply breathes in the salty air. Then, her face still turned to the sea, she says, “I was born…
There is something disconcerting about reading the unpublished poems of a great and passed poet such as Etheridge Knight. After all, these are poems the poet might have deemed unworthy or undesirable to share, and to suddenly have them available publicly is revealing. But that’s the thing about being a dead writer; you’ve had your say, and now the editors and public have theirs. While I felt a bit like I was sorting through someone’s private possessions postmortem while reading The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight (Kinchafoonee Creek Press, 2022)—which also includes published but uncollected work as well…
Giant theater chain AMC Entertainment has promoted Ellen Copaken to SVP Marketing, effective immediately. She was also appointed to sit on the company’s management executive committee. Copaken joined AMC in February of as VP, Growth Strategy, and led the exhibitor’s AMC Perfectly Popcorn launch in more than 2,600 Walmart stores (and Walmart.com) ), delivering “sales results that well exceeded company expectations,” the company said in its announcement today. She previously held top marketing roles at big brands including Frito-Lay, PepsiCo and Hostess. CEO Adam Aron frequently touts the popcorn initiative, including on a conference call this week, when he also…
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat is in the early stages of exploring how to use L-band spectrum from newly acquired Inmarsat to connect consumer devices directly from space, including potentially from small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). “We are still exploring what our roadmap and execution plan should be,” Viasat president Guru Gowrappan said in an interview Aug. 10, “but it’s an important priority.” Gowrappan said buying Inmarsat in May gave Viasat the largest global swathe of coordinated L-band spectrum, which he sees as a critical component for expanding in an emerging market for direct-to-device services. Smartphones launched earlier this year by…
Fire-Boltt Emerald smartwatch has been launched as the latest addition to the company’s “Jewels of Time” series. The smartwatch comes with a diamond-cut glass dial an elegant gem frame and a rotating crown. The smartwatch sports a 1.09-inch display with a resolution of 240×240 pixels. It also supports Bluetooth calling and is equipped with sensors for heart rate, sleep, and SpO2 level monitoring. The new Fire-Boltt Emerald is also said to offer support for tracking multiple sports modes.Fire-Boltt Emerald price in IndiaFire-Boltt Emerald smartwatch is priced in India at Rs. 5,999, and the smartwatch will be available for purchase via…
Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter and Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan take part in a panel discussion at the American Bar Association Antitrust Law Spring Meeting at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C., March 31, 2023.WASHINGTON — Two of the nation’s top corporate regulators on Thursday defended new guidelines on merger enforcement that have attracted pushback from the business community.”Which mergers go through and which ones do not can be hugely consequential for people’s lives,” Lina Khan, Federal Trade Commission chair said at an event hosted by the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project.”If you’re a worker, it…