Alien Technosignatures and The Contact Era

Today’s stories include Is the Big Bang simply a repeating life cycle of the universe? to Could a hidden variable explain the weirdness of quantum physics? and much more.

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The Fermi Paradox Revisited: Alien Technosignatures and The Contact Era, reports Keith Cowing for Astrobiology. "A new solution to the Fermi Paradox is presented: probes or visits from putative alien civilizations have a very low probability until a civilization reaches a certain age (called the Contact Era) after the onset of radio communications."

Is the Big Bang simply a repeating life cycle of the universe? Why some astronomers think we’re in a cosmic loop reports Troy Farah for Salon.

The First Stars May Have Weighed More Than 100,000 Suns, reports Universe Today. The visualization below shows what the universe looked like when it was going through its last major transformative era: the epoch of reionization. Credit: Paul Geil & Simon Mutch/The University of Melbourne.

Could a hidden variable explain the weirdness of quantum physics?--We have searched and searched but have never found one, explores Dartmouth’s  Marcelo Gleiser for Big Think. "Quantum entanglement is confirmed by countless experiments and promises to play a central role in the future of communications. Its persistent mystery is a confirmation that reality can be stranger than fiction."

New map of the universe's matter reveals a possible hole in our understanding of the cosmos, reports By Ben Turner for Live Science. "The cosmic web is a gigantic network of crisscrossing celestial superhighways that connects nearly everything in the universe."

Could we use antimatter-based propulsion to visit alien worlds? explores Laurence Tognetti for Space.com What if traveling to exoplanets were no longer the realm of science fiction?

‘Unbelievable’ Spinning Particles Probe Nature’s Most Mysterious Force, reports Allison Parshall for Scientific American. "The strong force holds our atoms together. Scientists may have observed its small-scale fluctuations for the first time."

The symphony of Jupiter—Xi Zhang at the University of California Santa Cruz, describes the forty-year monitoring of Jupiter for Nature.com that reveals long-term oscillations and teleconnections across the north–south hemispheres and upper–lower atmospheres. This discovery has important implications for the atmospheres of exoplanets and brown dwarfs.