Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe?

Such a scenario in which the universe is born from inside a wormhole (also called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge) is suggested in a paper from Indiana University theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski in Physics Letters B. The final version of the paper was available online March 29 and will be published in the journal edition April 12.
Poplawski takes advantage of the Euclidean-based coordinate system called isotropic …

Model of the brain-machine interface for real-time synthetic speech production. The stroke-induced lesion (red X) disables speech output, but speech motor planning in the cerebral cortex remains intact. Signals collected from an electrode in the speech motor cortex are amplified and sent wirelessly across the scalp as FM radio signals. The Neuralynx System amplifies, converts, and sorts the signals. The neural decoder then translates the signals into speech commands for the speech synthesizer.

By implanting an electrode into the brain of a person with locked-in syndrome, scientists have demonstrated how …

An international team of scientists has observed four super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies, which may provide new information on how these central black hole systems operate.
Their findings are published in December’s first issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
These super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies are called active galactic nuclei. For the first time, the team observed a quasar with an active galactic nucleus, as part of the group of four, which is located more than a billion light years from Earth. The scientists …

Galaxies rotate. Each of them would fly apart and create a cosmic mess, were it not for the gravitational forces that bind together the many billions of stars and large quantities of dust and gas that constitute a typical galaxy like our Milky Way.
By applying Newton’s law of gravity to the observed mass distribution of the galaxies, we can predict the rotation curve for each galaxy. If we do this, and compare the derived rotation curves to the observed rotational velocities, it becomes apparent that galaxies rotate much faster …

MIT students build a high-altitude, photo-snapping balloon using off-the-shelf components

Scientists and students alike have previously launched low-budget balloons that rise to the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, snapping unbelievable photos from near-space. But MIT’s Icarus team managed the same feat using only off-the-shelf items, and for a measly cost of $150. Here’s how they did it.
The MIT students list everything that they used to assemble the launch vehicle, including a prepaid Motorola i290 phone with GPS, a cell phone charger and disposable hand warmers to keep everything operable at …

Veteran sports bettors and bookmakers are not prone to fantastic notions. They like to think that everything new is just something old in a fashionable suit.
But this fall, the stereotype no longer fit. Years of studied cynicism gave way to breathless talk. Las Vegas had a mystery on its hands.
Each Thursday morning at precisely 10 a.m. Nevada time, every major casino sports betting operation in the world from here to Costa Rica was being simultaneously pounded by thousands of bettors wagering millions of dollars on the same few college …

Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year.
“By contrast,” Hawking says, “there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information …

Until now, there have been two known types of black holes: stellar-mass black holes that are several times more massive than our sun and are created when really big stars die out, and supermassive black holes that are millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and which sit in the center of most, maybe all, galaxies, including our own Milky Way. While astrophysicists have been fairly certain of how the smaller black holes are created, the creation of the larger ones has been largely a mystery. …

A researcher’s algorithm could teach computers a new privacy trick.

The computer science problems that earned Craig Gentry his job at IBM sound a bit like Zen koans. Could Google search the Web without knowing what it was looking for? Can an e-mail filter identify spam without reading it? Could an official count votes in an election without opening a ballot?
Those privacy puzzles, as Gentry has shown in an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, aren’t as paradoxical as they seem. In a cryptographic epiphany last summer, the 35-year-old IBM ( IBM – …

This week, researchers found hints of misty ice caverns on a Saturn moon and dedicated a dark matter lab in the deepest mine in the US

The case for liquid water beneath the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus has gotten a boost, with the discovery of salty ice grains that were blasted into space in the moon’s gigantic plumes of ice and water vapour. The salt may have been leached from rocks in the moon’s core by a reservoir of subsurface liquid water, which could be a potential habitat for …

“Why is everybody suddenly wearing those new sandals and listening to that new band? It’s so trendy!” A recent study has investigated this sentiment in order to understand why some cultural products and styles die out faster than others. According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out.

In their study, Jonah Berger from the …

Feynman: Ways of thinking (Part One of Two)

Feynman: Ways of thinking (Part Two of Two)
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A new telescope may let scientists see what happened after the big bang

The European Extremely Large Telescope will dwarf all other telescopes. In 1609 Galileo’s “Old Discoverer” had a lens an inch in diameter. Now the Keck Observatory on top of a mountain in Hawaii has two mirrors, each of them 10m across, that are so smooth and so perfect that even if they were stretched out to the width of the world their irregularities would still be only inches high. The Extremely Large Telescope — its name so …

The division of labor by the two cerebral hemispheres—once thought to be uniquely human—predates us by half a billion years. Speech, right-handedness, facial recognition and the processing of spatial relations can be traced to brain asymmetries in early vertebrates

Key Concepts

The authors have proposed that the specialization of the brain’s two hemispheres was already in place when vertebrates arose 500 million years ago.
The left hemisphere originally seems to have focused in general on controlling well-established patterns of behavior; the right specialized in detecting and responding to unexpected stimuli.
Both speech and …

The flow of seawater across Earth’s surface could be responsible for small fluctuations in the planet’s magnetic field, a controversial new study says.
If so, the research would challenge the widely accepted theory that Earth’s magnetic field is generated by a churning molten core, or dynamo, in the planet’s interior.
“If I am correct, then the dynamo theory is in bad shape, and all kinds of things about core dynamics also fall apart,” said study author Gregory Ryskin, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University in Illinois.
Ryskin’s …

The idea that the human brain sees tools as an extension of the body is an old one. Now scientists have some proof that it’s true.
Tool use is not entirely unique to humans, but the efficient use of a wide range of tools is a key skill separating us from other animals. Researchers have long thought that when we use a tool, even for just a few minutes, it changes the way our brain represents the size of our body; the tool becomes a part of what is known …

The dwarf planets and other objects that litter the Kuiper belt in the far reaches of our solar system are a strange bunch, but astronomers have found what they think might be the weirdest one.
Discovered on Dec. 28, 2004 (catalogued as 2003 EL61 and nicknamed “Santa” for a time), the minor planet now known as the dwarf planet Haumea, to honor its Hawaiian discovery, is as big across as Pluto and one-third of its mass, but shaped something “like a big squashed cigar,” said one of the astronomers who …