Physics World Weekly offers a unique insight into the latest news, breakthroughs and innovations from the global scientific community. Our award-winning journalists reveal what has captured their imaginations about the stories in the news this week, which might span anything from quantum physics and astronomy through to materials science, environmental research and policy, and biomedical science and technology. Find out more about the stories in this podcast by visiting the Physics World website. If you enjoy what you hear, then also check out our monthly podcast Physics World Stories, which takes a more in-depth look at a specific theme.
https://physicsworld.com/a/celebrating-attosecond-science-physics-tournament-focuses-on-fun/
Scanning the seabed with lasers could inform the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast looks at how studying the deep-ocean floor could help scientists who are scanning the cosmos for signs of intelligent life. Our guest is Pablo Sobron of the SETI Institute and Impossible Sensing, who explains how the Laser Divebot spectrometer is shedding light on the biochemistry of the seafloor – and what this information tells us about the biodiversity of the oceans and how life could emerge elsewhere in the universe.
Also in this episode, Aarhus University’s Jeffrey Hangst talks about the first ever observation of freefalling antimatter – which was made by Hangst and colleagues using the ALPHA-g experiment at CERN. While the experiment confirmed that antimatter falls down rather than up, there is still a tantalizing possibility that future experiments could identify a small difference in how matter and antimatter respond to gravity.