Links for 2020-12-30

  1. The search for dark matter is dramatically expanding [Quanta Magazine]
  2. The rise and fall of adobe flash. Finally got around to reading this, and wow, talk about a walk down memory lane. [Ars Tehnica]
  3. Ask ethan: how did the entire universe come from nothing?. If you’ve any interest in this, I highly suggest you check out Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe from Nothing. [Forbes]
  4. Moths have evolved stealth acoustic cloaking to evade bat sonar. "Optical metamaterials that refract and scatter light in adaptive ways are already familiar in the living world, for example in the photonic crystals found on strongly coloured, microstructured insect cuticles or butterfly wings. Now it appears that acoustic stealth technology too was discovered first by natural selection. Neil et al. report evidence that the intricate array of scales on some moth wings acts as an acoustic metamaterial to reduce echoes from ultrasound. This, they say, is probably an adaptive property that reduces the visibility of moths to the sonar searches of their predators, bats." [Nature]
  5. Artificial intelligence solves schrödinger's equation. The title is a stretch, but this is still pretty fucking awesome. [Phys.org]