Powerful Emptiness
An abandoned mine on the island of Sardinia will be the site of a new experiment called Archimedes, in which physicists will attempt to measure the energy of empty space, reports Manon Bischoff for Scientific American. This vacuum energy is thought to be tied to dark energy, which accelerates the expansion of the universe. When physicists estimate the vacuum energy by inferring it from quantum fluctuations of fields, they find a 120 order-of-magnitude discrepancy between the calculated value and the force speeding up the universe's expansion. Natalie Wolchover reported on efforts to resolve this tension for Quanta in 2018.
Another Way to Tweet
Researchers didn't know whether birds could get social gratification through video. But a new study found that parrots making video calls to one another responded as they would to real birds and seemed less lonely, reports Hannah Devlin for The Guardian. Parrots, known for their linguistic abilities, are very social creatures. In a 2018 interview with Jordana Cepelewicz for Quanta, the neuroscientist Erich Jarvis discussed birdsong, what it teaches us about language and the social motivation behind speech. | |
