Physics

Mysterious, unseen structures on the outskirts of creation most likely aren’t tugging on our universe, according to a new study. The paper reexamines “dark flow”— an unusual, one-way motion of matter —using measurements of supernovae and the existing laws of physics.

In 2008, a team of scientists took measurements of hundreds of galaxy clusters and calculated that everything in the visible universe—and likely beyond—is flowing at 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour in the same direction.

The data couldn’t be explained by the distribution of matter in the known universe, so the scientists suggested that chunks of matter had been pushed out shortly after the big bang, and their gravity is now pulling on everything around us.

A wire that is just four atoms wide and one atom tall, yet works just as well as the ordinary copper wires running behind your wall, was recently created by an international team of scientists.

The breakthrough brings closer to reality a future where computers smaller than a pinhead are faster and more powerful than some of today’s supercomputers, according to the researchers.

Remember the Na’vi – the blue-stripped humanoid species with pointy ears and a powerful bond with nature in last year’s biggest sci-fi epic, “Avatar”? They were created in a physics lab.

In fact, the entire movie “stands out for the amount of physics that was involved,” Robert Bridson, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, told me in an e-mail. “A lot of the environments, and of course the characters, were completely computer-generated.”