Solar Energy Tech Company turns Sidewalks into Solar Panels. Credit NowThis Earth

The Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) is home to many interdisciplinary projects which benefit from the synergy of a wide range of expertise available at the institute. One such project is the study of black holes that could have formed in the early universe, before stars and galaxies were born.

Such primordial black holes (PBHs) could account for all or part of dark matter, be responsible for some of the observed gravitational waves signals, and seed supermassive black holes found in the center of our Galaxy and other galaxies. They could also play a role in the synthesis of heavy elements when they collide with neutron stars and destroy them, releasing neutron-rich material. In particular, there is an exciting possibility that the mysterious dark matter, which accounts for most of the matter in the universe, is composed of primordial black holes. The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to a theorist, Roger Penrose, and two astronomers, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, for their discoveries that confirmed the existence of black holes. Since black holes are known to exist in nature, they make a very appealing candidate for dark matter.

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

Food Technology

Cooking and food preparation have gone through lots of changes throughout history.

Credit Future Science

Future Transport This Is The First Look Into The Futuristic Mercedes Concept Vehicle. Credit Tech Trend

From the rapid development of vaccines for Covid-19 to the stunning collection of an asteroid sample, these were the biggest science moments of the year.

Covid-19 dominated science coverage in 2020, and rightly so. The world grappled with how to combat the SARS-CoV-2 virus, learning about how it spread (whether it was on surfaces, via droplets or being airborne) and how it affected the human body (from immunity to symptoms like loss of smell.) But scientific endeavors in other fields, whether affected directly by the pandemic or indirectly by public health measures, didn’t come to a complete halt because of SARS-CoV-2. In incredible advances, researchers used three new tools for making discoveries about the sun, discovered that dinosaurs got cancer and published a study on a discovery in a Mexican cave that changes the timeline of humans’ arrival to the Americas. But none of those moments made this list of the biggest science stories of the year. It’s a subjective round-up, of course, but one compiled by our editors after much thought and debate. Presenting the key innovations, studies and discoveries that made 2020 an unforgettable year in science!

Astronomers have found ghostly circles of radio emission, hanging in space like cosmic smoke rings. What are they? No one knows. The race is on to find out.

In September 2019, the astronomer Anna Kapinska gave a presentation showing interesting objects she had found while browsing new radio astronomical data. She had started noticing very weird shapes she couldn’t fit easily to any known type of object. Among them, labeled by Anna as WTF?, was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke-ring. None of the attending astronomers had ever seen anything like it before, and had no idea what it was. A few days later, another astronomer, Emil Lenc found a second one, even more spooky than the first one.