^{Adam Fenster for Sciencenews. “When squeezed to high pressure between two diamonds (shown), a material made of carbon, sulfur and hydrogen can transmit electricity without resistance at room temperature”.}

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

Superconductivity is the capacity that some materials show to conduct electricity without any resistance. Hence, with no energy loss. Such behavior would provide a huge advantage, since it optimizes the efficiency of all our electronics components and electrical transmission. Applications are endless; improved current technologies, going from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to magnetically levitated transportation and quantum computers.  

First observed in 1911, superconductivity required temperatures reaching absolute zero, the point where there is an abrupt transition in the behavior of electrons, that suddenly couple in pairs (called Cooper Pairs), instead of repelling each other, and flow...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

By functionalizing with a single xenon atom the tip probe of a Kelvin force microscope, a group of researchers from the CATRIN of Palacký University in Olomouc, the Institute of Physics of the CAS, the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS, and the IT4Inovations Supercomputing Center at Technical University of Ostrava have achieved an extraordinary increase in the resolution of atomic scanning microscopy, increasing the sensitivity of the microscopy up to sub-atomic level.

Thanks to this achievement, this group -lead by Pavel Jelínek- was able to capture the real image of the anisotropic (asymmetric) electronic charge distribution -called sigma-hole- on single atoms of halogen compounds. The sigma hole (abbreviated as σ-hole) asymmetric electron density distribution was predicted 30 years ago but never observed before, until now.

This prediction is based on the...

^{Image from ESA, the European Space Agency.}

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

In just one week, two very important studies have shed light on the now irrevocable fact that black holes in the center of galaxies are playing a predominant role in the galaxy formation, event that would explain why astronomers and astrophysicists have found a black hole in the center of galaxies.

In a former RSF article entitled “Supermassive Black Holes Birthing Stars at Furious Rate’ we had addressed the case in which astronomers have observed supermassive black holes creating star-forming regions. Since 2017 a team of astrophysicists have been observing supermassive black holes, and the possibility that these entities could be birthing stars, finding evidence of new star birth from material being ejected from the black hole, called an outflow. An outflow of gas could be responsible for creating new stars by swirling around the center of the black...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

By means of numerical simulations and computational calculations, a team from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Georgia Gwinnett College observed that rotating black holes can be traversable. The results were published in Phys. Rev. D, and the calculations were made by Caroline Mallary, student of the research team's director, Gaurav Khanna. 

Mallary wanted to test whether Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey) in Christopher Nolan's movie Interstellar, could survive the plummet into Gargantua - a fictional, rotating, supermassive black hole about 100 million times the mass of our sun. The physical properties of this black hole were taken from the book written by Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, on which the film was based. 

These mysterious creatures called black holes, are regions in space where there is an enormous accumulation of energy/matter, concentrated in such a...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

What is this 240-year-old problem all about?

Leonhard Euler (1707 - 1783), Swiss mathematician and physicist, is most popularly known for his glorious equation called Euler's Identity: e^iφ + 1 = 0, depicted below.

^{Geometric interpretation of Euler's identity, where i represents the imaginary axis of the complex plane and φ is the angle.}

Euler’s contributions in mathematics have been indispensable for the development of physics, particularly in quantum mechanics. As if that were not enough, now the quantum solution to Euler’s puzzle will probably mark a milestone in quantum computation, and in information theory. The puzzle as such consists of the following: Euler had examined the problem of having six different regiments, each with six officers of different ranks,  and he wondered if these 36 officers can be arranged in a 6x6 square, so that each row and column contains one officer of...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

The most spread worldview on the origin of our Universe, is that of the big explosion, commonly known as the Big Bang (BB). We have asked ourselves what happens right after, at the first instants of the universe… the most accepted view among cosmologists is that of an exponential expansion, called the inflation theory.

The BB theory results from doing a backward-in-time evolution to the universes' expansion. If it is expanding as time moves forward, this implies the universe was smaller, denser and hotter in the distant past. The BB theory predicts that the early universe was much denser and extremely hot, about 273 million degrees above absolute zero, too hot for atoms to exist, only free electrons and hydrogen nuclei – protons and neutrons- where present.  After cooling during the expansion, these nuclei and electrons combined to compose the first light atom, the Hydrogen (H). It is now known...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

Recently awarded the Nobel prize for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity, Sir Roger Penrose had earlier developed a theory known as “conformal cyclic cosmology“ (CCC) which posits that the universe iterates through infinite cycles, from one aeon to the next, such that the universe became uniform before rather than after the Big Bang. Each cycle starts out from a singularity before expanding and generating clumps of matter, which eventually gets sucked up by supermassive black holes, which over the very long term disappear by continuously emitting Hawking radiation. This process restores uniformity and sets the stage for the next Big Bang. In CCC, the future time-like infinity of each previous iteration being identified with the Big Bang singularity of the next. Penrose popularized this theory in his 2010 book Cycles of Time: An...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

In a former RSF article entitled Between the Generalized Holographic approach and Data Science, we addressed the potential of trained artificial neural networks to replace our scientific models, and the possibility of reality being a numerical simulation was discussed. Somehow we had anticipated this next and very recent work from Vitaly Vanchurin, from the University of Minnesota Duluth, proposing that we live in a neural network. It is an audacious idea!

In our prior article we had anticipated the impact of artificial neural networks and deep machine learning … what we had not foreseen was that they would be used literally as the framework for the theory of everything! There is a saying: "better be a historian, than a prophet", meaning that a historian writes about past events, and so taking small risk, while a prophet takes a huge risk with his predictions. Though, we should not brag about this feat...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

Image: Evan Leeson/Bob Peterson/lowjumpingfrog. None of these animals contain a single trace of blue pigment.

Colors in nature come mainly from three sources: pigments, structural colors, and bioluminescence.

Have you noticed that some colors are more intense than others in nature?
Such is the case of blue and green colors, compared to reds and the rest. The main reason is that blue and green can be structural colors, while the remaining colors seem to not be part of the team.

Structural coloring is the result of microscopically fine structured surfaces that interfere with visible light, sometimes in combination with pigments. For example, peacock tail feathers are brown pigmented, but because of their microscopic structure, they also reflect blue, turquoise and green light. And they are often iridescent. Thus, structural coloring is a classic optical effect of interference and diffraction, rather than a quantum...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

The question above could be preceded with the following one: Is space an illusion?

Since the magnitude of a force like electromagnetic and gravity between two objects is inversely proportional to the distance between them, it seems plausible to conclude objects only interact with other objects when they are close, and the closer they are, the stronger the interaction. For instance, when bringing two magnets towards each other, one can feel the increase in the rejection between them (if approached by the same pole) or attraction between them (if opposite polarity). And since the force can be felt when the objects are still not in contact, one could say that the force is mediated by a field. Fields spread out as they propagate outside of the object.  

This dependence of forces and interactions upon distance is the main characteristic of the principle of locality. Locations and speeds of objects are...