Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Chinese researchers inspired by the eyes of the desert ant have developed a compact chip to detect the orientation of polarised light. The chip can have a wide range of uses including in navigation, fingerprint detection, and even identifying cancerous tissue, the team said. Polarisation photodetectors (pol-PDs) are special light sensors that can sense the…

The plot has just thickened in the mystery tale about the unseen mass skulking inside the largest cluster of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. In the heart of Omega Centauri, a huge glob of gravitationally bound stars over 17,000 light-years away, astronomers have just uncovered evidence of an entire swarm of stellar-mass black holes.…

The black hole information paradox has puzzled physicists for decades. New research shows how quantum connections in spacetime itself may resolve the paradox, and in the process leave behind a subtle signature in gravitational waves. For a long time we thought black holes, as mysterious as they were, didn’t cause any trouble. Information can’t be…

How we classify cancer and spot it in its earliest stages could need an urgent rethink: researchers have found that even some healthy women carry cells with the key hallmarks of breast cancer. These cells are known as aneuploid cells, and have an abnormal number of chromosomes. They’re common in invasive breast cancer, and it’s…

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is still zipping around the sun making history, and it’s gearing up for another record-setting approach this week. On December 24 at 6:53AM ET, the spacecraft’s orbit will take it just 3.8 million miles from the solar surface, according to the space agency. That’ll be the closest it — or any…