The European Central Bank should consider tweaking the composition of its public-sector bond holdings to mirror the European

Minecraft speedruns have always been a minor subject in the eSports world

They may not be as stylish as a DeLorean or as sturdy as a blue police box, but wormholes in space could hold the key to real-life time travel – and a team of experts think they’ve figured out how. The trio of scientists delved deep into the laws of physics and discovered that it might be possible for humans to one day zip across galaxies in a matter of seconds, or journey through time itself. Now, this is all to do with the general theory of relativity and quantum physics, so don’t expect to get your head around it too easily. However, in their paper, Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov of Canada’s University of Alberta, and Pavel Krtouš of Prague’s Charles University proposed that a specific kind of wormhole would “inevitably” be “transformed into a time machine” if it was subject to particular conditions. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter For the uninitiated, wormholes can be described as spacetimes in which a “kind of tunnel exists connecting distant parts in the universe”. The main problem with them is… they don’t actually exist. At least not in any tangible way. As Drs Eric Christian and Louis Barbier put it in an explainer for NASA: “Wormholes are allowed to exist in the math of ‘General Relativity’, which is our best description of the Universe. “Assuming that general relativity is correct, there may be wormholes. But no one has any idea how they would be created, and there is no evidence for anything like a wormhole in the observed Universe.” Still, numerous experts in the field of gravitation and general relativity have spent years or even decades working on them, including Stephen Hawking in his time. For their paper, Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov explored what is known as a ring wormhole, which was first described in 2016 by theoretical physicist Gary Gibbons, of Cambridge University, and Mikhail Volkov of the University of Tours. Unlike the spherical contortions of spacetime we might attribute to black holes, the ring wormhole proposed by Gibbons and Volkov connects sections of the universe (or, indeed, different universes) which are generally described as “flat”, as ScienceAlert notes. Ring-shaped masses could potentially create some pretty remarkable distortions in what would otherwise be flat spacetime if you consider how their electrical and magnetic fields might interact. And so Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov decided to consider two types of such wormholes: “a wormhole connecting to flat spaces; and a wormhole connecting two distant domains in the same space”. For the latter, they concluded that if a “massive thin shell” surrounded one of the mouths of the ring wormhole, a “closed timelike curve” would form. This, as the name suggests, would mean that any travelling object (or ray of light) would come back to the exact same point whence it began. In other words, you could travel in space and time and return to your point of departure. The most exciting aspect of ring wormholes, as the authors point out is that: “For the ring wormhole an observer passing through it moves in a flat (or practically flat spacetime), while in the case of ‘standard’ (spherical) wormholes he/she should pass a domain filled with the matter violating the null energy condition.” Even without knowing what the “null energy condition” is, you can appreciate that the first option sounds a lot simpler. Now, before you start calling yourself Marty McFly or making a list of all the past mistakes you’d like to correct, we should stress that we’re a long way off seeing the creation of a bonafide, buckle-your-seatbelt time machine. But at least, thanks to the efforts of experts like Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov, we’re at least one step closer to going back in the future. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Dayot Upamecano FIFA 23 Shapeshifters SBC is now live. Here's how to complete the SBC and if it's worth it.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 12, 2023--

In a bid to surpass ChatGPT, Google is packing its own rival program Bard with

Instagram’s highly anticipated Twitter rival is expected to launch Thursday, according to a listing on Apple Inc.’s App

A user wrote worried about LS, 'I just saw the story now, nobody knows anything about him?'

OpenAI has temporarily stopped people from signing up to the premium version of ChatGPT, after it proved so popular the company was unable to operate it. Just over a week ago, OpenAI held a developer conference in which it announced a range of new features, including a faster version of its chatbot and access to the new GPTs feature that lets people make their own versions of ChatGPT. Many of those new tools are limited to subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, the paid-for version that also offers fewer restrictions on how much ChatGPT can be used. Now, however, OpenAI is “pausing” new sign-ups “for a bit”, its chief executive Sam Altman announced. The interest in those tools had proven too much for the company to deal with. “we are pausing new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups for a bit :(,” he wrote on Twitter. “the surge in usage post devday has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience. you can still sign-up to be notified within the app when subs reopen.” Mr Altman’s announcement came after a run of technical issues in the wake of the new announcements. Since the event was held on 6 November, there have been six days of outages, according to OpenAI’s official status tracker, including one major outage that took ChatGPT offline for almost two hours. In the weeks before that, OpenAI had seen no downtime at all, according to the same page. ChatGPT Plus was launched in February, for $20 per month. Since then, OpenAI has added a range of new features to the offering, including those announced at its recent developer conference. The company says that the premium offering supports it work in making ChatGPT available for free. Artificial intelligence work is notoriously expensive because of the complex calculations required to answer a question, and so the free version of ChatGPT operates at a considerable loss. “We love our free users and will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT,” OpenAI’s website says. “By offering this subscription pricing, we will be able to help support free access availability to as many people as possible.” Read More ChatGPT creator mocks Elon Musk in brutal tweet ChatGPT goes offline ChatGPT update allows anyone to make their own personalised AI assistant

British musician Sting has become the latest artist to voice concern over Artificial Intelligence (AI), saying we should be "wary" of the technology and that it will be a "battle we all have to fight."

The special counsel investigating Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 storming of

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s e-commerce division will make “huge” investments in its Taobao shopping app, as the newly