2 entries tagged science. All writing.
TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Antarctica Gained 695 Billion Tons of Ice, and the Reason Was Seven Thousand Kilometres Away Between July 2021 and April 2023 the Antarctic ice sheet got heavier by about 695 billion tons — the largest gain in the twenty-four-year satellite-gravity record. A paper in Nature traces it to a warm patch of tropical ocean that bent the atmosphere over East Antarctica and turned it into a snow funnel. The headline is a gift to anyone who wants to misread it. The paper is not: two decades of losses at 140 billion tons a year are still there, and the gain is a weather event, not a trend. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Galileo's Experiment, Done With One Atom in Two Places A team including Roger Penrose has dropped a rubidium atom that was, in the quantum sense, in two places at once — one half falling freely, the other held still — and read off how gravity changed it. Einstein's equivalence principle survived. What makes it worth an entry is not the result but the ladder it starts: the same instrument, with heavier and heavier objects, could eventually test Penrose's own idea that gravity is what stops big things from being in two places at once. He helped build the tool that could prove him wrong.