During an average day of knocking electrons loose from their host atoms with high-energy lasers, a team of European physicists uncovered the shortest time interval ever measured in nature. At about 20 attoseconds, the interval is indeed very short. That's 20 billionths of one billionth of one second. Blink and you've missed it many, many times over again. Read more »

Scientists trying to explain the universe's accelerating expansion usually point to dark energy, which seems to be pushing everything apart.

But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist: We're inside a black hole that exists in another universe. Specifically, a black hole that rebounded, somewhat like a spring.

Some fairly mind-blowing physics is involved here, but the gist is that Nikodem Poplawski of IU-Bloomington used a modified version of Einstein's general relativity equation set that takes particle spin into account. Read more »

Looking to build a time machine but nervous about the classic grandfather paradox, aka the Marty McFly conundrum, aka the idea that you might unwittingly do something that causes you to never exist in the first place? An MIT professor and a few of his quantum quoting buddies have published a theory that allows for time travel while circumventing the grandfather paradox. All you need is a quantum teleportation device and a precise understanding of the idea of postselection--Flux Capacitor optional. Read more »

The world of quantum mechanics gives us some pretty weird things -- such as matter that exists in all possible places at once, and strange states of matter like supersolids, a phenomenon in which a solid essentially acts like a liquid.

In the supersolid state, which scientists have ben trying to glimpse for years, matter retains the lattice-like structure it possesses as a solid, but it stops being rigid, meaning there is less friction. Instead, it flows like a liquid.

To look for this odd behavioral change, scientists have been studying a type of helium and making it very cold, bringing it to within a fraction of absolute zero.

In 2004, scientists figured out a way to detect supersolid helium by filling a special rotating pendulum and watching how it spun as the helium cooled. They figured the rotation speed would change when the helium became a supersolid rather than a regular solid, because of that loss of friction. It did change, and later experiments replicated the results. Read more »

There's a race brewing between Chinese and American researchers, but this one has no weapons or spheres of influence or even space -- though it does involve lasers. It's a race to generate the most random numbers the fastest, and by tapping the quantum noise in a laser beam the Chinese just took the lead, turning out 300 megabits of random numerals per second to break a U.S. record that stood for only a matter of days.

Randomness can be confusing and often misleading, but it can also be extremely useful. Cryptographers seeking to generate unbreakable codes, for instance, love randomness. Read more »