...The reason physicists have been skeptical about wormholes comes down to a problem with energy. To hold the throat of a wormhole open, you would need something called exotic matter. In physics, ordinary matter (stars, gas, you, your coffee) always has a positive energy density which corresponds to positive mass. Exotic matter would have negative energy density, essentially “negative mass.” We have never observed anything like that in nature. Most wormhole solutions that physicists have found over the decades require this exotic matter to exist, which is why wormholes have stayed firmly in the category of “mathematically possible but physically unlikely.” Today’s paper offers a way around this problem.

Instead of trying to prop open a wormhole with exotic matter, the authors add two extra physical fields to Einstein’s equations alongside gravity. The first is an electromagnetic field, the same electric and magnetic fields you encounter in introductory physics. This wormhole carries both electric and magnetic charge. The second is something called a dilaton...

Why should we care about the dilaton? Because it is not something the authors invented for convenience. It shows up naturally in several theories that physicists take seriously as candidates for deeper laws of nature. Superstring theory, which attempts to unify all fundamental forces, predicts a dilaton. So does Kaluza-Klein theory, which tries to explain electromagnetism as a consequence of a hidden extra dimension of space. And Brans-Dicke theory includes one too. If any of these theories are correct, the dilaton exists, and the kind of wormhole described in this paper becomes a natural prediction of Einstein’s equations...

...“This is an important step toward highly efficient and flexible hydrogen energy for a fossil-free energy system,” explains Professor Daniel Banuti, Director of the Institute of Thermal Energy Technology and Safety (ITES).

One of the key advantages of this design is that it eliminates the need to compress air before ignition. “A conventional gas turbine, such as those used in power plants or under aircraft wings, consumes about 50 percent of its power to compress air to the high pressure needed for efficient combustion—power that is then unavailable for electricity generation,” Banuti explains...

...this system creates the required pressure through detonation waves inside the combustion chamber...

...Integrating a turbine with the combustion chamber to produce electricity introduces additional complexity. “This is extremely difficult because the very fast and intense combustion processes in the chamber make stable energy transfer to the turbine challenging. We are the first to successfully operate such a turbine and generate electricity in the process,” says Banuti...

...Previously, a creative design engineer would develop a 3D model of a new car concept. This model would be sent to aerodynamics specialists, who would run physics simulations to determine the coefficient of drag of the proposed car—an important metric for energy efficiency of the vehicle. This simulation phase would take about two weeks, and the aerodynamics engineer would then report the drag coefficient back to the creative designer, possibly with suggested modifications.

Now, GM has trained an in-house large physics model on those simulation results. The AI takes in a 3D car model and outputs a coefficient of drag in a matter of minutes. “We have experts in the aerodynamics and the creative studio now who can sit together and iterate instantly to make decisions [about] our future products,” says Rene Strauss, director of virtual integration engineering at GM...

“What we’re seeing is that actually, these tools are empowering the engineers to be much more efficient,” Tschammer says. “Before, these engineers would spend a lot of time on low added value tasks, whereas now these manual tasks from the past can be automated using these AI models, and the engineers can focus on taking the design decisions at the end of the day. We still need engineers more than ever.”

Scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have observed particles emerging directly from empty space for the first time, confirming a long-standing prediction of quantum chromodynamics...The STAR collaboration’s work marks the first direct observation of vacuum-derived matter...

...DHS has issued memos claiming (without facts or law in evidence) that officers can arrest people and enter homes without signed judicial warrants. This has always been false. And it’s not edging any closer to the truth no matter what this administration might say in Truth Social posts and/or court filings...

...The opinion [PDF] doesn’t cut corners or grant Trump’s DOJ more respect than it has earned. (It’s running in the red at the moment.) Multiple people who were arrested following a “targeted” operation, that saws mostly involved federal officers waiting in a Home Depot parking lot in hopes of rounding up day laborers, sued the government. The government has already lost once. This order clearly explains why the government is losing twice. Pretending conjecture is the same thing as established facts does nothing more than inform the court that you suck at your job...

Your browsing history, your location, your political preferences. For years, tech companies have found ways to turn personal data into profit. Now, a new and far more intimate frontier is opening: the electrical signals produced by your brain.

This is not science fiction. Nor is it about brain implants for paralysed patients or experimental medical procedures. A fast-growing consumer market of non-invasive neurotechnology – wearable headsets, brain activity-reading headbands, focus-enhancing devices – is already here, already being sold and already collecting neural data from ordinary users. But the legal and ethical frameworks to govern it are struggling to keep up...

Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, brain signals could potentially qualify as biometric or health data, both of which attract stronger protections. But consumer neurotechnology, when sold as wellness products rather than medical devices, often falls into a regulatory grey area, sitting awkwardly between health law, consumer protection and data privacy rules...

The stakes here are higher than with most forms of personal data. Neural signals are not like a credit card number that can be changed if compromised. Generated by your brain in real time, they can increasingly be used to infer things about you that you have not chosen to disclose – such as emotional responses, cognitive patterns, and other reactions you may not consciously be aware of...

They asked nicely at first.

After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who’d recently moved to Minneapolis, local law enforcement officials requested a partnership with the federal government to investigate the case, as they’d done in past shootings involving federal agents.

When the Trump administration refused to cooperate, Minnesota prosecutors ratcheted up their efforts. They sent a series of strongly worded legal letters demanding evidence in the Good shooting as well as the shootings of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant who was wounded a week after Good was shot, and Alex Pretti, who was killed on Jan. 24.

Still, the administration rebuffed the requests.

This week, prosecutors from Hennepin County and the state of Minnesota took the next step to force the Trump administration’s hand. They filed a federal lawsuit against the departments of Homeland Security and Justice over the evidence in the shootings, an action that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, whose jurisdiction covers Minneapolis, characterized as “unprecedented in American history.”...

...because VPNs obscure a user’s true location, and because intelligence agencies presume that communications of unknown origin are foreign, Americans may be inadvertently waiving the privacy protections they’re entitled to under the law...

...VPNs might protect you against garden-variety criminals, but the intentional commingling of origin/destination points by VPNs could turn purely domestic communications into “foreign” communications the NSA can legally intercept (and the FBI, somewhat less-legally can dip into at will)...

Certainly the NSA isn’t concerned about “incidental collection.” It’s never been too concerned about its consistent “incidental” collection of US persons’ communications and data in the past and this isn’t going to budge the needle, especially since it means the NSA would have to do more work to filter out domestic communications and the FBI would be less than thrilled with any efforts made to deny it access to communications it doesn’t have the legal right to obtain on its own.

Since the government won’t do this, it’s up to the general public, starting with everyone sharing the contents of this letter with others. VPNs can still offer considerable security benefits. But everyone needs to know that domestic surveillance is one of the possible side effects of utilizing this tech.

...The discovery of DF2 proved that dark matter is a distinct, physical substance that can be separated from normal matter. This was a severe blow to Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which was designed to account for why stars at the outer edges of galaxies were moving too fast. MOND posits that at extremely low accelerations, like those experienced by stars at the edge of a galaxy, gravity acts a little bit stronger than expected.

...if MOND were true, DF2’s stars would be moving much faster than their visible mass accounted for.

But that’s not what the researchers saw. They found they were moving at a sluggish pace, perfectly explainable by classical, unmodified Newtonian dynamics. So, the discovery of DF2 presented a fatal paradox for MOND...

...At this point the data is solidly pointing to a string of ultra-diffuse galaxies that seem to be simply missing dark matter. So the question becomes - why are they missing dark matter?

According to the research team, the most likely explanation is the “Bullet Dwarf” Collision theory. In essence, it’s what happens when you crash two galaxies together at blinding speeds...

...Since dark matter only interacts via gravity, the dark matter halos holding these galaxies together simply pass straight through one another like ghosts. But normal matter, which, in this case, are giant gas clouds, physically run into each other in a massive collision. That collision separates the gas from its dark matter...

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers...

...dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards...

Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement...

Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them has been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.

...America is now engaged in its biggest conflict in decades, with thousands of troops headed into possible combat on the shores of a country the size of Alaska with more than three times the population of North Korea—and with a president whose only formal speech on the war so far consisted of 19 minutes of jumbled thoughts. The American people deserve to know why so many of their top officers are being tossed out of their jobs.

Right wing broadcasters are having a very good time under Brendan Carr, who has looked to destroy all remaining media consolidation limits to let them merge. Such companies, like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, don’t do journalism so much as they do soggy, right wing propaganda and infotainment, usually with endless fear mongering about drugs, homelessness, and crime rates.

They’re just one part of the right wing’s effort to remake the entirety of media into a massive safe space for dim autocrats.

...Nexstar (a very Republican friendly company that also owns The Hill), not that long ago fired a journalist whose reporting angered Trump. Combined with Tegna, the two companies will own 221 Big Four broadcast stations, or more than half of the U.S. stations affiliated with FOX, NBC, ABC, or CBS...

...This aggressive, Trump-loyal consolidation hasn’t, and isn’t, just being confined to broadcast television (see: Twitter, TikTok).

This is, to be clear, a coordinated and illegal authoritarian/corporatist effort to ignore the public interest and the law to expand right wing propaganda’s power over an already clearly befuddled and broadly misinformed electorate...