Credit: boscorelli / Shutterstock
Why doesn’t the world make sense? At the fundamental level of atoms and subatomic particles, the familiar “classical” physics that accounts for how objects move around gives way to quantum physics, with new rules that defy intuition. Traditionally these are expressed as paradoxes: particles that can be in two places at once, cats that are simultaneously alive and dead, apparently impossible faster-than-light signaling between distant particles. But quantum rules are perfectly logical and consistent—the “paradoxes” are the result of our trying to impose on them the everyday reasoning of classical physics.
What’s more, over the past several decades we’ve come to understand that the classical and quantum worlds don’t exactly operate by “different” rules. Rather, the classical world emerges from the quantum in a comprehensible way: you might say that classical physics is simply what quantum physics looks like at the human scale.
Scientists use carbon-fiber electrodes (gray) to lure electricity-eating microbes (orange). These microbes grow incredibly slowly, so attracting them can take time. Researchers left this electrode underground for five months.
Credit: Yamini Jangir and Moh El-Naggar
Last year, biophysicist Moh El-Naggar and his graduate student Yamini Jangir plunged beneath South Dakota’s Black Hills into an old gold mine that is now more famous as a home to a dark matter detector. Unlike most scientists who make pilgrimages to the Black Hills these days, El-Naggar and Jangir weren’t there to hunt for subatomic particles. They came in search of life.
In the darkness found a mile underground, the pair traversed the mine’s network of passages in search of a rusty metal pipe. They siphoned some of the pipe’s ancient water, directed it into a vessel, and inserted a variety of […]
Kansas Republican Governor Sam Brownback
The verdict is in, and it’s time for conservatives to face the cold hard facts.
Right-wing trickle-down Reaganomics doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work internationally, it doesn’t work nationally and it doesn’t work at the state level.
And we know this is true thanks in part to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s 2010 decision to turn his state into a “real live experiment” in Reaganism and the religion of trickle-down economics.
See more news and opinion from Thom Hartmann at Truthout here.
Quickly after taking office, Brownback and the Tea Party-controlled legislature passed massive tax breaks for the state’s 1%; repealed all income taxes for more than 100,000 businesses; tightened welfare requirements, making life harder for the working poor and poor children; privatized the delivery of Medicaid so his corporate buddies could have a bigger slice of the state action; cut $200 million from the education budget; eliminated four state agencies; and laid off 2,000 government employees.
In 2013, after he signed the largest tax cut in Kansas history with the […]
Naval Station Norfolk may experience as much as six feet of relative sea-level rise by the end of the century. Defense officials are beginning to work with nearby city governments to ensure vital infrastructure is protected.
Credit: US Navy
Norfolk Naval Station is the biggest naval installation in the world. But, Kerry said last November, “the land it is built on is literally sinking.”
That was just weeks before the big United Nations climate change conference in Paris, and Kerry was framing climate change as a national security issue.
“By fueling extreme weather events, undermining our military readiness, exacerbating conflicts around the world — climate change is a threat to the security of the United States,” Kerry said.
Norfolk is the home port for the cruisers, destroyers and battleships of the Atlantic Fleet. Rising sea levels and increasing […]
Credit” Pew Research Center
The U.S. is projected to have no racial or ethnic group as its majority within the next several decades, but that day apparently is already here for the nation’s youngest children, according to new Census Bureau population estimates.
The bureau’s estimates for July 1, 2015, released today, say that just over half – 50.2% – of U.S. babies younger than 1 year old were racial or ethnic minorities. In sheer numbers, there were 1,995,102 minority babies compared with 1,982,936 non-Hispanic white infants, according to the census estimates. The new estimates also indicate that this crossover occurred in 2013, so the pattern seems well established.
Pinpointing the exact year when minorities outnumbered non-Hispanic whites among newborns has been difficult. The change among newborns is part of a projected U.S. demographic shift from a majority-white nation to one with no racial or ethnic majority group that is based on long-running immigration and birth trends. But changes in short-term immigration flows and in fertility patterns can delay those long-term shifts.
