PhysOrg

One website I rather like is called PhysOrg. It’s a news aggregator website which nowadays puts up about two hundred science stories a day. I’ve referred to a fair number of them in my Physics Detective articles. PhysOrg was around when I started digging into physics twenty years ago. Back then the website was PhysOrg.com, now it’s Phys.org. See the Phys.org entry on Grokipedia for some background. It was founded in 2004 by two anonymous PhD students “in response to the scarcity of accessible, high-quality science journalism for informed audiences”.

Screenshot from the Phys Org website

You can also read that PhysOrg became Science X in 2012, when it broadened its remit from physics to science in general. It’s owned by Omicron Limited which has an Isle of Man accommodation address. See the Science X About Us page for original details. Also see the super-brief Phys.Org Wikipedia page where you can read that it’s “a news aggregator which re-publishes press releases and stories from news agencies”. In the next breath it says this is a business model known as churnalism. Click on the link and you can read that “Churnalism is the production of low-quality or unoriginal news articles, generally by paraphrasing other sources or press releases to avoid the need for time-consuming research or fact-checking”.

PhysOrg is a news aggregator website, and it’s free

I think this comes across as rather churlish from Wikipedia. PhysOrg is a news aggregator website, and it’s free. It isn’t a research lab, and it isn’t the New York Times. Along with the super-brief Wikipedia page, this churlishness makes me think Wikipedia are dissing the competition. Check out the Wikipedia PhysOrg talk page for some pretty unpleasant stuff, such as “right wing pseudoscience” and “woo-pushing puffpiece”. It looks like the Wikipedia editors are playing thought police and censoring things they don’t like. Like they censored Einstein’s variable speed of light on the Variable speed of light page, despite what I told them on the talk page. This is not just my view, and it isn’t limited to physics. Elon Musk accused Wikipedia of bias and called them Wokepedia. Even the Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger said Wikipedia was guilty of left wing bias. It looks like it’s true, because Wikipedia banned the Daily Mail. I wonder if they they didn’t like the way PhysOrg reported on that:

Screenshot from the Phys Org website

I also think it’s unfair to PhysOrg, because newspapers are similar. They take press releases from universities and scientific institutions, and give them wider publicity. They don’t have a panoply of experts on the payroll to make sure it’s rock solid science. Yes, they might consult a friendly physicist, but he’s unlikely to be too disparaging, because that would be bad for physics. Hence a newspaper like The Guardian tends to pass on what they’re given. PhysOrg are the same, but they’re passing on a whole lot more. Like I said, they’re publishing about two hundred science stories a day. A newspaper like The Telegraph publishes maybe a hundred science stories a year. It’s hard to gauge the exact figures, but I had a print subscription until recently, and I tell you, it’s not many. Especially for particle physics and cosmology, where I’d say we’re lucky to see one story a month. If that.

We’re talking around 25 articles a day, of which perhaps 5 are Physics Detective material

Yes there’s some dodgy stuff in the PhysOrg stories, but it’s not as bad as New Scientist, and it’s not PhysOrg’s fault. Journal editors are supposed to filter out the crap, not PhysOrg. Not when they’re giving us two hundred stories a day for free, with an editorial team of 10 plus 22 contributing authors. As for the stories themselves, you need to keep reading what comes up to catch the drift. There’s a lot of stories I don’t care for, but that’s my fault. I’m into fundamental physics and cosmology, which is only a small part of the field. To give you an idea how small, according to the Brave chatbot there are circa 26,400 physicists and astronomers in the USA, of which only a few thousand are particle physicists, and a few hundred are cosmologists. So perhaps a fifth of their total output is my cup of tea. As for how much output there is, a 3-day search in the PhysOrg Physics section returns 30 stories, whilst a 3-day search in the Astronomy & Space section returns 47 stories:

 Physics news screenshot from the Phys Org website

That’s 77 articles in all for 3 days, of which perhaps 15 are my kind of thing. So we’re talking around 25 articles per working day, of which perhaps 5 are Physics Detective material. This is a small fraction of PhysOrg’s total output. All the more so because there are other sections, namely Nanotechnology, Earth, Chemistry, Biology, Other Sciences, Medicine, and Technology.

Black Ivory coffee: Elephant gut bacteria may contribute to its smooth, chocolaty flavor

There’s some really interesting stuff in those other sections. See the nanotechnology story 2D material offers a solution to long-standing obstacle in diamond-based circuits. It’s about a roundabout way of doping diamond for use in electronics, and is related to what I was saying last time about Derek Muller’s blue LED video. I liked it. I didn’t like the Earth story Adoption of electric vehicles tied to real-world reductions in air pollution because I didn’t believe it. I grow vegetables, and I’ve taken a side interest in the subject. But I did like the Chemistry story Black Ivory coffee: Elephant gut bacteria may contribute to its smooth, chocolaty flavor. There is a type of coffee made from coffee beans picked out of elephant dung. Ugh! And of course I absolutely loved the Biology story about Veronika the cow scratching her back with a broom:

Cell Press image. Caption: Veronika using the broom with the bakery as background. Credit: Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró

That made the national press, so you’ve probably seen it already. I thought it was a lovely story. I like cows. They’re nice, provided you don’t take your dog for a walk in their field, especially when they’ve got calves. I’m sure animals are more intelligent than people think. I’ve thought that for fifty years, ever since my sister’s horse tried to bite me and laughed about it like the famous Mr Ed. Talking of intelligence, I thought the Other Sciences story on AI-induced cultural stagnation is no longer speculation was an interesting read. That’s because I think people misunderstand AI. In my experience it will tell you what most people think, not the empirical truth. I thought the Medical story about Prediabetes was interesting too, as was the Technology story called Engineers invent wireless transceiver that rivals fiber-optic speed. That could be really something.

Particle permutation task can be tackled by quantum but not classical computers, study finds

When it comes to physics, I did not like Particle permutation task can be tackled by quantum but not classical computers, study finds. It’s just vaporware, billed as “a new quantum advantage demonstration”. Only they don’t actually demonstrate anything, just like Kretschmer et al didn’t actually demonstrate anything. These guys never ever will, because quantum entanglement is scientific fraud. Because entanglement experiments are merely demonstrating Malus’s law, not spooky action at a distance. However the PhysOrg staff who wrote, edited, and reviewed this story, namely Ingrid Fadelli, Gaby Clark, and Robert Egan, don’t know that. So whilst I don’t like the article, I’m not blaming PhysOrg for that.

ATLAS confirms collective nature of quark soup’s radial expansion

Nor did I like ATLAS confirms collective nature of quark soup’s radial expansion. As you are doubtless aware, ATLAS is a CERN experiment. The article concerns a PRL paper called Evidence for the Collective Nature of Radial Flow in Pb+Pb Collisions with the ATLAS Detector. It’s an open access paper, which is good. What’s not so good is that the paper uses 10-year-old data and has over three thousand authors. Nobody is going to challenge a paper like that. Especially when it’s full of buzzwords and formulae amd graphs and damned statistics. I didn’t understand it. Even though the paper proper was only 5 out of 24 pages. I didn’t even understand what it was getting at. However I thought the PhysOrg article explained things well. Or should I say the Brookhaven National Laboratory article. PhysOrg did say the article was written by the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and linked to the original:

Image from the Brookhaven National Laboratory article ATLAS Confirms Collective Nature of Quark Soup’s Radial Expansion  Caption: This is an example of a heavy-ion collision event recorded by ATLAS in November 2015. This analysis used data from the entire 2015 run. Tracks reconstructed from hits in the inner tracking detector are shown as orange arcs curving in the solenoidal magnetic field. The green and yellow bars indicate energy deposits in the Liquid Argon and Scintillating Tile calorimeters respectively. Credit: ATLAS Collaboration.

The original Brookhaven article gives Karen McNulty Walsh and Peter Genzer as contacts, but I’m not sure if they wrote it. I’m note sure what changes PhysOrg made either. Their version, which was edited by Gaby Clark and reviewed by Robert Egan, is a little different but not much. Anyway, the article tells how the an international team used ATLAS data to analyze the radial outflow when two lead ions collide head on. It says the collisions generate temperatures 250,000 times hotter than the Sun. It also said this: “These extreme conditions essentially melt the protons and neutrons that make up the colliding ions, setting free their innermost building blocks, quarks and gluons, to create a quark-gluon plasma (QGP)”. There was more, and then I got the gist. When you collide two gold atoms such that they meet off-centre, you get an elliptical quark-gluon plasma. However when you collide two lead atoms such that they meet head on, you get a more intense spherical quark-gluon plasma. To which my sentiment was so what? Especially since the gluons in ordinary hadrons are virtual. As in not real. Especially since as per Martin van der Mark’s paper On the nature of stuff and the hierarchy of the forces, you can’t fit a 2.3 MeV quark inside a 938 MeV photon. The PhysOrg staff don’t know it, but quark-gluon plasma is like pea soup. There are no peas in pea soup. In similar vein, there are no quarks or gluons in a quark-gluon plasma.

Innovative optical atomic clock could combine single-ion accuracy with multi-ion stability

An article I did like was Innovative optical atomic clock could combine single-ion accuracy with multi-ion stability. The original article was written by Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt. PhysOrg linked to the German version, but there is a version in English. It’s reporting on another PRL paper called  Nuclear Spin Quenching of the ²S_1/2 → ²S_7/2 Electric Octupole Transition in ¹⁷³Yb+. I like it because it’s about optical clocks, and because an optical clock goes slower when it’s lower because light goes slower whern it’s lower. Because the speed of light is not constant. It varies in the room you’re in, just like EInstien said. The article concerns a new improved optical clock. It’s a multi-ion ytterbium-173 optical clock, which “could combine the high accuracy of individual ions with the improved stability of several ions”.

Image from New type of optical atomic clock in sight. Caption: Unlike other atoms (left), ytterbium-173 (right) has a large nuclear spin and a strongly deformed nucleus whose strong fields interact with the electron shell. This turns forbidden quantum jumps into allowed transitions (see red-green arrow “slightly allowed”) and makes it easier to excite the transition with a laser. Credit: Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB)

It involves an excited state with a very long lifetime, which require a very specific laser frequency, and usually a very strong laser lightm which is problematical. However ytterbium-173 has properties that meant the team could overcome the problems, and “even control several ions simultaneously”. What’s not to like? OK I didn’t like the mentions of quantum computing, but such is life.

Dark Energy Survey scientists release analysis of all six years of survey data

Another article I liked was Dark Energy Survey scientists release analysis of all six years of survey data. This was in the Astronomy & Space section, and refers to a NOIRLab press release. which concerns a paper submitted to Physical Review D. The paper is a summary of 18 supporting papers. I didn’t like the paper much, because it was 41 pages and heavy going, with 172 authors and too many references to ΛCDM for my liking. That’s because I think of dark matter as inhomogeneous space, and dark energy as space itself, responsible for the expansion of the universe as well as the accelerating expansion. But never mind what I think, the DES guys and gals have done the spadework, so fair play to them:

Bullet Cluster image from NOIRLab. Caption: The Bullet Cluster is made up of two galaxy clusters that are colliding, one moving through the other, about 3.7 billion light-years away in the constellation Carina. These galaxy clusters act as gravitational lenses, magnifying the light of background galaxies. This phenomenon makes the Bullet Cluster a compelling piece of evidence supporting the existence of dark matter. Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA

The article tells us how the Dark Energy Survey (DES) is “an international collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will help reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe”. There is some debate on that, see The Nobel prize winner who thinks we have the universe all wrong. But regardless, DES observed 669 million galaxies covering one eighth of the sky, and have released results which combine weak lensing and galaxy clustering. They used weak lensing “to robustly reconstruct the distribution of matter in the Universe”, then tested the ΛCDM model and the wCDM model against their data. The latter is where the dark energy density is not fixed, which is what you’d expect from the principle of conservation of energy. Apparently the results fitted the former better, but didn’t rule out the latter. The results did not however fit with predicted galaxy clustering from either model. Hence DES will be investigating alternative gravity and dark energy models. All good stuff. Maybe I should give them a call.

Rule-breaking supermassive black hole discovered in the early universe

There’s lots of other interesting news stories. See for example Rule-breaking supermassive black hole discovered in the early universe. I liked that, because I have a nasty speaking suspicion that supermassive black holes didn’t grow at all, and instead are broken remnants of the pre Big Bang universe.  The original article is by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Image from the NAOJ article Theory-Breaking Extremely Fast-Growing Black Hole. Caption: Artist’s impression of a supermassive black hole system. Infalling gas forms a bright corona near the black hole. In some systems, a jet is launched. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The article says “a team led by scientists at Waseda University and Tohoku University used the Subaru Telescope to measure the motion of gas around a supermassive black hole that existed when the Universe was less than 1.5 billion years old and found that it is accreting gas at 13 times the Eddington Limit”. Don’t you just love it when observations demonstrate a problem with a theory? I do when it comes to black holes, because I’ve read Friedwardt Winterberg’s paper on Gamma ray bursts. The associated paper appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, it’s open access, and it’s called Discovery of an X-Ray Luminous Radio-loud Quasar at z = 3.4: A Possible Transitional Super-Eddington Phase.

I recommend it

There’s lots of other gret articles on PhysOrg. See for example EAST achieves new plasma confinement regime using small 3D magnetic perturbations. That’s about nuclear fusion. Bring it on I say. Also see Chiral phonons create orbital current via their own magnetism. I wonder if there’s a parallel between phonons and photons. In addition check out Wormholes may not exist—we’ve found they reveal something deeper about time and the universe. I liked some parts, other parts not so much, because I have a plain vanilla take on black holes. There lots of other stories, far too many to do PhysOrg justice, but I hope this helps. All in I’d say PhysOrg is a cornucopia of science. Yes, some of the stories are hype, and some don’t pass the Physics Detective test. But that’s science for you. That’s life, and like I said, it isn’t PhysOrg’s job to filter out the bad stuff. I think it’s a good website. I recommend it. Good job PhysOrg.