physics

Sometimes the discovery of new physics demands insane levels of energy. Big machines. Fancy equipment. Countless hours of sifting through reams of data.And then sometimes the right combination of materials can open a doorway to invisible realms in a space little bigger than a tabletop.  Take this new kind of relative to the Higgs boson, for example. It was found lurking in a room temperature chunk of layered tellurium crystals. Unlike its famous cousin, it didn't take years of smashing up particles to spot it, either.…

For many years, the computing power of the PC depended on the investment made in it. The more expensive it was, the higher performance it had so that it could run more demanding hardware games. But as the game system requirements increase yearly, such hardware investment also depreciates rapidly. Moreover, hardware is in short supply, which is not getting better. But when it becomes better, it costs a lot. But there is a solution. You don't have to think about how weak or powerful your PC is with cloud gaming. You choose…

Experienced cooks can tell when cooking oil is at the right temperature by the sizzling sound produced by inserting moist chopsticks.Moistened chopsticks, water droplets in hot cooking oil reveal complicated bubble dynamics and sound characteristics.As its name implies, fluid mechanics is a branch of physics concerned with the mechanics of fluids (liquids, gases, and plasmas) and the forces on them. It can be divided into two areas of study: fluid statics and fluid dynamics.While many fluid dynamics researchers deal with…

She decided to study physics. It was, in a way, good timing—a Black American woman had just become the first of her kind to earn a physics PhD, back in Greene-Johnson’s home state. At Stanford, Greene-Johnson was the only Black student in her major, but that didn't surprise her. What did was the presence of six Black PhD students in the department. “I had brothers and sisters galore,” she told me.Her adviser greeted her by saying, “I wanted the other one,” referring to one of the white women in her class. “But you’ll…

Every time I think I’ve seen the electric scooter envelope pushed as far as it can go, someone comes along and builds a bigger envelope. This time that someone is California-based electric scooter company Voro Motors, which is prepared to break the internet (and perhaps a few bones) with a pint-size 65 mph (105 km/h) seated electric scooter known as the Voro Motors RoadRunner Tronic. The Roadrunner Tronic is a heavily (and I mean HEAVILY) modified version of the company’s existing RoadRunner electric scooter. That…

“ homology theory depends only on the topology of your manifold. is Floer’s incredible insight,” said Agustin Moreno of the Institute for Advanced Study.Dividing by ZeroFloer theory ended up being wildly useful in many areas of geometry and topology, including mirror symmetry and the study of knots.“It’s the central tool in the subject,” said Manolescu.But Floer theory did not completely resolve the Arnold conjecture because Floer’s method only worked on one type of manifold. Over the next two decades, symplectic…

Since the velocity is defined as the time-rate of change of position, the slope of this plot should give the velocity. That puts this wave speed at 2.85 m/s, which is pretty close to the theoretical prediction. I'm happy with that.But what if I want to look at the speed of a wave in a giant metal chain, instead of a string of beads? I actually don't have one of these things lying around—and I probably couldn't move it anyway. So let's build a computational model.Here's my idea: I'm going to let the chain be made of a…

Lindsay Krall decided to study nuclear waste out of a love for the arcane. Figuring how to bury radioactive atoms isn’t exactly simple—it takes a blend of particle physics, careful geology and engineering, and a high tolerance for reams of regulations. But the trickiest ingredient of all is time. Nuclear waste from today’s reactors will take thousands of years to become something safer to handle. So any solution can’t require too much stewardship. It’s gotta just work, and keep working for generations. By then, the…

In a new experiment, scientists created two time crystals inside the superfluid, and brought them to touch.Time crystals were long believed to be impossible because their perpetual motion would seem to defy the laws of physics. However, using quantum physics scientists have not only created time crystals, but they have also now shown that they have the potential to power useful devices in the future.Scientists have created the first ”time-crystal” two-body system in an experiment that seems to bend the laws of physics.It…

Somewhere out in the cosmos, there's the physics equivalent of a unicorn. Catching even a glimpse of this oddity that looks like the isolated tip of a magnet would be like a beacon in the night, pointing the way to grand, unifying theories of absolutely everything.  Yet aside from one tiny exception in the early 1980s, nobody has seen anything that remotely looks like the fabled beast of particle physics, the magnetic monopole.Of course, physicists might simply be looking for them in all the wrong places. A new analysis…