Freak accidents happen all the time, but few are quite as bizarre as the tale of Philip Metzger, a former NASA planetary physicist who almost lost his hearing after dropping a toilet lid.
Source: vice.com
While some point to galaxy cluster work by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, dark matter was truly “discovered” in the 1970s by Vera Rubin, who was studying the rotation of spiral galaxies. Rubin found that galaxies were spinning too fast for the matter we could see in them, yet they weren’t flying apart. Rubin’s work left astronomers with a choice: Either our laws of gravity were wrong, or there was something else out there pulling on the galaxy’s stars and speeding them up while keeping them together.
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You probably scratched your head last year if you read about time crystals, likely 2017’s most esoteric, widely covered popular science story. Even if you understood how they worked, you might not have known what use they could have. Time crystals, systems of atoms that maintain a periodic ticking behavior in the presence of an added electromagnetic pulse, have now piqued the interest of one well-funded government agency: the Department of Defense.
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MIT, Harvard, and LBNL physicists have discovered a new quantum electronic material, the “kagome metal,” whose atomic structure resembles a Japanese basketweaving pattern and exhibits exotic, quantum behavior.
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