Plausible

Japan is ageing faster than any other country in the world, boasting one of the highest life expectancies. Women typically live to 87 and men to 81. Almost 40% of its population is over 60, a figure expected to continue expanding as the population shrinks. Couples in Japan now have an average of just 1.3 children – far below the 2.1 children societies need to remain stable.Japan once placed its elderly at the top of the social hierarchy, even holding a national holiday to honour their contributions to society. But no…

PTI Berlin, February 2Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is currently not plausible, according to a new report.Climate policy, protests, and the Ukraine crisis -- the participating researchers systematically assessed to what extent social changes are already underway, while also analyzing certain physical processes frequently discussed as tipping points.The researchers concluded that social change is essential to meeting…

If you took somebody who’d only seen the first installment in the Fast & Furious franchise and then showed them the ninth installment without any context immediately afterwards, there’s a distinct possibility they’d refuse to believe the films were connected at all. After all, the 2001 opener was a mid budget street racing thriller about a band of thieves with hearts of gold boosting DVD players, whereas F9 featured such distinguishing characteristics as John Cena’s impossibly long zipline, magnetized fighter jets…

Time travel might seem like nothing more than science fiction, but scientists actually say that isn’t the case at all. Time travel could actually be possible with wormholes and other mechanics. Further, it could not only be possible, but the ability to create paradox-free time travel could also be completely plausible, according to a physicist named Germain Tobar. Tobar was a physics student at the University of Queensland in Australia when he approached what we know as the “grandfather paradox” to try to solve…

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?It's a…

via Warner Bros. Bruce Wayne has spent his entire life dedicating every ounce of himself to protecting Gotham City as Batman, but what if every single problem to have manifested in his hometown dating back decades was entirely his fault? That’s the fascinating theory to have been put forward on Reddit, which suggests that the intense levels of crime, madness, and murder in Gotham were caused by the Dark Knight. When you break it down, it makes an alarming amount of sense, and it would be unfortunately ironic…