Science and technology updates and summaries. No hype, no spin, no tip-toeing around inconvenient truths. News each Wednesday, new topical video each Saturday.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in physics. She is author of the books “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” (Basic Books, 2018) and “Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions” (Viking, 2022).
From Sabine Hossenfelder. **Buy AI-powered UPDF Editor with Exclusive discount: https://bit.ly/Superace_Sabine_Apr25 One License can be used on All Platforms to Edit and Sync PDFs! It was supposed to be impossible, but a group of researchers say they can generate electricity from Earth’s magnetic field. I’ve had a look. Paper: https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.7.013285 🤓 Check out my new…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out Brilliant’s new data science courses! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. I didn’t plan on becoming particle physicists’ enemy number one, but somehow I have. Here’s how it all happened. 🤓 Check out my new quiz app…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Learn more about the science videos you’ve been watching with Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Correction: When I say that there are 2/3 of galaxies that spin one direction and 1/3 the other, that should have been…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Use code sabine at https://incogni.com/sabine to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. All across the globe, new nuclear power plants are being built and some shuttered plants are even being revived as countries look for more ways to create clean, cheap electricity. But the nuclear renaissance faces problems. 🤓…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out my own introduction to quantum mechanics course on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. CERN wants to build a new particle collider which will smash protons together at roughly 6 times the energies seen at the…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. 🌏 Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra here ➼ https://NordVPN.com/sabine It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌ AI industry leaders are promising that we will soon have algorithms that can think smarter and faster than humans. But according to a new paper published by researchers from AI firm Anthropic,…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out Hollyland’s Lark M2S at their website https://hollyland.info/4bCV0uG or on Amazon https://amzn.to/3ZVaowT #Hollyland #HollylandMic #LARKM2S #MissionInvisible This is a comment on a recent video by Matt O’Dowd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjkqedrTwZo I find it extremely distressing that we are still discussing this even though it’s abundantly clear that naturalness arguments have historically worked extremely…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Learn science in the easiest and most engaging way with Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Physicists have been searching for direct evidence of dark matter for decades, but it’s eluded them… up until now, maybe. According to…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Go to https://ground.news/sabine to get 40% Off the Vantage plan and see through sensationalized reporting. Stay fully informed on events around the world with Ground News. The political situation at US-American campuses has been developing quickly, with some claiming that Trump’s actions are signs of fascism, dictatorship, or authoritarianism. Today I have…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out my introduction to quantum mechanics course on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. The company Pulsar Fusion recently unveiled their design plans for a new nuclear fusion powered rocket. This idea isn’t as crazy as you…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Special Offer! Use our link https://joinnautilus.com/SABINE to get 15% off your membership! While Microsoft’s Majorana quantum computing chip might have grabbed all the headlines earlier this year, Amazon appears to have quietly made some big progress in the quantum computing race. Their new Ocelot chip uses cat qubits to support a scalable…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out new courses each month on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. On March 15, a group of researchers revealed some crazy news: using a new type of radar imaging technology, they claimed to have discovered new…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out courses in science, computer science, or mathematics on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Cosmology, the branch of physics that deals with the universe, is facing a bit of a crisis right now. Four crises, actually.…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Want to restore the planet’s ecosystems and see your impact in monthly videos? The first 200 people to join Planet Wild with my code SABINE23 will get the first month for free at https://planetwild.com/r/sabinehossenfelder/join/23 If you want to get to know them better first, check out their latest mission, where they go…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out my introduction to quantum mechanics course on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Researchers from the U.K. have created a new prototype battery made out of nuclear waste by turning the irradiated graphite shielding of nuclear…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. 🌏 Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra here ➼ https://NordVPN.com/sabine It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌ The promise of AI is that we humans might one day build something smarter than ourselves. But because we’re humans, chances are that we will first use it to gain power and…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Have a look at the science courses at Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. There’s something crazy going on in the world of physics right now. According to new data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Go to https://ground.news/sabine to get 40% Off the Vantage plan and see through sensationalized reporting. Stay fully informed on events around the world with Ground News. Many AI developers think that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is but a few years or a handful of years away. In this video I summarize what…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Only for 48 hours, enjoy 20% OFF on all Hoverpens and free shipping to most countries with code SABINE: North America / UK / Australia / International: https://bit.ly/sabine_novium EU: https://bit.ly/sabine_noviumeu In January, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released its DeepSeek-R1 model, which performed as well as the best American AI models with significantly…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out these science courses on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Physicists have come up with a new idea for how our universe began, and it could also explain dark matter. They say that if our universe…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out my quantum mechanics course on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. In 2020, a group of MIT researchers detected an anomaly in the nuclei of ytterbium atoms. They said that the nuclei’s strange behavior might be…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Just a brief explanation for what happened with last week’s climate science video. Sorry for the confusion which, in hindsight, was rather unnecessary. The earlier video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZv5zBNIhvE 🤓 Check out my new quiz app ➜ http://quizwithit.com/ 💌 Support me on Donorbox ➜ https://donorbox.org/swtg 📝 Transcripts and written news on Substack…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out the new data science course on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Physicists are stuck on trying to figure out why gravity and quantum mechanics don’t get along. For almost 100 years now, they have been…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Use code sabine at https://incogni.com/sabine to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Last week, the media reported that China had discovered 1 million tons of thorium – enough of the nuclear fuel to power the country for 60,000 years. How big is this news really? Let’s take a look.…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out courses in science, computer science, and mathematics on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. If you’ve paid any attention to science news over the past few years, you know that AI and quantum computing are being…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out courses in your favorite subjects on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Einstein-tiles, discovered in 2023, are shapes that can be used to cover a surface without gaps with a pattern that never repeats. A group…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Go to https://ground.news/sabine to get 40% Off the Vantage plan and see through sensationalized reporting. Stay fully informed on events around the world with Ground News. I’ve noticed an increasingly negative attitude of US-Americans to Europeans, and the other way round. It makes me sad because I think there’s much to admire…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out a variety of courses on your favorite subjects on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Why time passes is one of the biggest mysteries in physics, as the fundamental laws of nature don’t reflect a difference…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Learn science in the easiest and most engaging way possible with Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Magnets always have two poles. Meaning, if you break a magnet in half, both of those halves will also have two…
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From Sabine Hossenfelder. Until March 31, visit joinnautilus.com/sabine for an annual membership and receive your free Moleskin Journal (US residents only) Last year, Jonathan Oppenheim’s theory of post-quantum gravity was the only theory that made it into my Best of 2024 summary. Post-quantum gravity is one of the most interesting theories for merging quantum physics…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out my introduction to quantum mechanics course on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Two weeks ago, Microsoft made a big splash in the media by claiming that they’d found a way to build a scalable quantum…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Want to restore the planet’s ecosystems and see your impact in monthly videos? The first 200 people to join Planet Wild with my code SABINE2 will get the first month for free at https://planetwild.com/r/sabinehossenfelder/join/2 If you want to get to know them better first, check out their latest mission, where they go…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. I have my own introduction to quantum mechanics course that you can check out on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Physicists have a lot of questions about our universe. Here’s one more to add to the list:…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Go to https://ground.news/sabine to get 40% Off the Vantage plan and see through sensationalized reporting. Stay fully informed on events around the world with Ground News. In this video I explain why I think that academia will be mostly defunded in the coming decades. In a nutshell it’s because it’s for all…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Easiest way to learn more about how AI *really* works: Use my Brilliant link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription. So much has happened in AI in the past week, it’s hard to keep track. Grok-3, Google’s AI co-scientist, GPT-5 rumours, and a Microsoft…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out courses in science, computer science, or mathematics on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Earth’s magnetic field has a hole located over the South Atlantic Ocean. It’s called the South Atlantic Anomaly and according to NASA…
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From Sabine Hossenfelder. First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. A brief summary of what Microsoft’s recent announcement for a topological quantum core, Majorana-1, means — and doesn’t mean. 🤓 Check out my new quiz app ➜ http://quizwithit.com/ 💌 Support me on Donorbox…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Learn your favorite subjects whenever and wherever you have the time with Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Physicists have reexamined a decades old quantum paradox and found a way to make quantum computers more efficient — in…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out courses in science, computer science, or mathematics on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. According to the incoming director of CERN, Mark Thomson, the large hadron collider (LHC) can tell us whether or not the universe…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Invest in your mind with Imprint and click the link to get 20% off your subscription: https://imprintapp.com/Sabine-2025 Donald Trump and Elon Musk are in full control of the U.S. government, and they’re using that power to attack “woke” DEI programs and slash federal funding for academic research. Let’s take a look at…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out my introduction to quantum mechanics course on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. AI will require lots of energy. So it makes sense that AI supporters would invest millions of dollars into nuclear fusion, the holy…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Use code sabine at https://incogni.com/sabine to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan! I want to read you an email that I was asked to keep confidential because I think it explains some of my worries about academia. The Nature Physics comment is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys4079 I knew that physicists would…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Learn the science behind the videos you watch with Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Most physicists believe that our universe began with a Big Bang. But how did the laws of nature – for example, the strength…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Go to https://ground.news/sabine to get 40% Off the Vantage plan and see through sensationalized reporting. Stay fully informed on events around the world with Ground News. A physicist suggests that we fix climate change with a 50 Gigaton nuclear bomb. This isn’t a joke. And I think it might actually work. A…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out courses in science, computer science, and mathematics on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. The release of DeepSeek’s R1 model has thrown the world of AI into chaos, with US firms dropping their safety guardrails in…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out courses in science, computer science, or mathematics on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. While time travel is cool science fiction tech, it seems to directly contradict our current understanding of physics. But what about, instead…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Want to restore the planet’s ecosystems and see your impact in monthly videos? The first 200 people to join Planet Wild with my code SABINE2 will get the first month for free at https://planetwild.com/r/sabinehossenfelder/join/2 If you want to get to know them better first, check out their latest mission, where they go…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Take my introduction to quantum mechanics course on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Physicists think that our universe started out as just a lot of quantum fluctuations. That means, if you’re able to calculate wave-function of those…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Special offer for science lovers! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. I got a lot of questions about a new theory of everything that supposedly explains dark energy and quantum physics by way of the "Alena Tensor". I had…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. 🌏 Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra here ➼ https://NordVPN.com/sabine It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌ Recently, social media has been circulating a clip of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussing the idea that we will need to reconfigure society as we continue to improve AI. Is that true?…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out my own course, an introduction to quantum mechanics on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. A new startup in Canada wants to build the first “conscious” artificial intelligence using quantum computing. What’s their definition of consciousness?…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Give it a try. Join 600,000 other intellectually curious readers. Subscribe for free at https://readnautilus.com/ American viewers might have noticed the price of eggs going up (again), despite Trump’s promises to bring it down. That’s because the bird flu is spreading through America’s animals like wildfire. But should we be worried about…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. You can find lots of amazing courses on science, computer science, on mathematics on Brilliant! With our link, first 30 days are free and you get 20% off the annual premium subscription ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Today I have a brief recap of the Stargate Project, recently announced by the Trump administration and OpenAI,…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Check out numerous courses in science, computer science, or mathematics on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine. Last month, physicists published a paper claiming that string theory’s Veneziano amplitude is the only way to complete a quantum theory…
From Sabine Hossenfelder. Go to https://curiositybox.com/sabine and use code SABINE25 to get 25% off your first Curiosity Box OpenAI recently released a research preview of their first AI agent “Operator”. But that’s not all. Apparently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is set to meet with White House officials on January 30 in order to discuss something…