Black hole entropy hints at a surprising truth about our universe | New Scientist
Imagine you’re standing in front of a closed door. Behind it is a teenager’s bedroom, and your task is to rate how messy it is on a scale of 1 to 10. But here’s the twist: you can’t open the door – and you don’t even know what kind of stuff might be inside.
Physicists have worked out a universal law for how objects shatter | New Scientist
How many pieces will a dropped vase shatter into? Imaginechina Limited / Alamy
A dropped plate, a smashed sugar cube and a broken drinking glass all seem to follow the same law of physics when it comes to how many fragments of a given size they will shatter into.
We might have just seen the first hints of dark matter | New Scientist
Mysterious radiation from the outer part of the Milky Way could be a sign of dark matter Triff/Shutterstock
An unexplained glow that appears to emanate throughout the Milky Way’s outer regions could be our first hint of what dark matter is made of, but astronomers say it is too early to know for sure.
We may need a fourth law of thermodynamics for living systems | New Scientist
A HeLa cell in telophase, a stage at which the chromosomes have separated DR MATTHEW DANIELS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The physics of thermodynamics, which involves quantities like heat and entropy, offers well-established tools for determining how far from equilibrium an idealised system of particles is. But when it comes to life, with its complex interconnected cells, it’s not clear that our current array of thermodynamical laws is enough – and a set of experiments involving human cells might be a first step towards creating a new one.
A new understanding of causality could fix quantum theory’s fatal flaw | New Scientist
The ball rolls across the floor because it was kicked, just as Earth orbits the sun because it is tugged by gravity. The connection between cause and effect is fundamental to how we understand the world – or at least, it is for the world we see, governed by classical physics.