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Alright, the analogy might not be the best. The Large Hadron Collider is a high energy particle accelerator, while the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is a state of the art particle detector, which traps high-energy charged particles called cosmic rays and analyzes them. You see, the AMS can practically perform the same functions as the LHC, only the high […]
You just got out of the office, looking to head home to a soothing dinner, only to find that it’s raining cats and dogs outside – and you forgot your umbrella of course. Do you walk or run to your car to stay as dry as possible? It might sound trivial, but this is a […]
This week, rumors surrounding the imminent discovery of the Higgs boson actually came through, after CERN scientists officially announced during a press conference that, indeed, they have finally come at the end of their long and arduous search for the elusive God particle. The whole event has been heralded as a historical milestone, as the Higgs boson was one of the unproven, key […]
The Higgs boson or the God particle, as it’s also been commonly referred to, is a hypothetical particle that endows other elementary particles with mass. Confirming its existence is of crucial importance to physicists at the moment, otherwise scientists would be forced to rethink another method of imputing mass to particles. Last year, scientists at CERN registered a hint; […]
The Standard Model of Physics is currently the accepted model which describes how sub-atomic particles behave and interact in the Universe. A recent analysis of data gathered by a decade-long experiment at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, shows a certain particle decay happening at a pace far exceeding that predicted by […]
Hand stencils, red dots and animal figures currently represent the oldest examples yet found so far in cave art in Europe; using a new, improved technique, researchers have dated the walls at 11 Spanish locations, including the World Heritage sites of Altamira, El Castillo and Tito Bustillo, and found that one motif, a faint red […]
Atom = at·om, noun \ˈa-təm\, from the greek ἄτομος (atomos) meaning “indivisible”. Apparently the atom isn’t that indivisible after all. Scientists at the University of Bonn have managed to split an atom into two with a special laser, in special conditions, before merging it back together. Just like in the case of light, quantum mechanics allowed an atom to be split […]
Curious enough, one hundred years after renowned physicist Max von Lauefirst used X-ray diffraction to unravel the intricate atomic architecture of molecules, a team of international scientists have analyzed tiny protein crystals at an unprecedent scale of resolution, premiering in the process the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser. Called the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford, the X-ray […]
Effective quantum computers are still far away, but researchers are already showing more and more advantages these devices would bring to the table. A trio of theorists have shown one more talent of a quantum computer: it would be powerful enough to study the inner workings of the universe in ways that are far beyond […]
Scientists have described and proven how many of the world’s phenomenae function, from the very fundamental laws of Newtonian mechanics, to the discrete behaviors of quantum physics, eventually peering through some of the Universe’s most well kept secrets. It’s remarkable then, how little we know about how heat is conducted through and between materials. A better […]
Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at University of California in San Diego, was recently fined by a police officer for allegedly driving through a stop sign. Confident that he did nothing of the sorts, Krioukov sought justice like most of us would, in court that is, however during the hearing he presented a somewhat atypical piece of […]
Quantum technology is the future, no doubt. The impact of computing devices based on quantum effects finally entering service would be vast and of immense positive consequence to the scientific world, and hence mankind, comparable with the invent of the microchip. While this future might still seem far fetched, judging from the number of successful […]
An 8.6-magnitude earthquake and powerful aftershocks struck the coast of Indonesia today, resurrecting fears of a big tsunami like the one responsible for one of the biggest modern disasters ever. However, this earthquake, which struck at 2:38 p.m. local time (4:38 a.m. ET), about 270 miles (435 kilometers) off the coast of the Indonesian island […]
It’s been pretty quiet lately at the LHC, despite the fact that things seemed to be getting pretty hot, as the elusive Higgs boson appeared to be cornered. However, CERN cracked up the volume, announcing they achieved a record collision energy of 8 TeV. LHC recap The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and […]
Cloaking has turned into a subject of great interest for scientists in the past decade, most likely because of its military potential. We’ve seen some exciting prototypes developed, from optical invisibility cloaks to temporal cloaks, and now French scientists at the University of Aix-Marseille have added a new member to the cloaking family, one that renders […]
Hailed as yet another big step towards devising working quantum computers, scientists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have successfully managed to generate quantum qubits inside a semiconductor for the first time, instead of vacuum. A qubit is the quantum analog of a bit. While a bit must be read either as a 0 or 1, the qubit can […]
Researchers at MIT have developed a new revolutionary technique, in which they re-purposed the trillion frames/second camera we told you about a while ago, and used it to capture 3-D images of a wooden figurine and of foam cutouts outside of the camera’s line of sight. Essentially, the camera could see around corners, by transmitting […]
All 80.000 items from Albert Einstein’s archives, including a huge number of manuscripts, personal correspondence with several lovers and a touching letter to his ailing mother are going to be published online. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which currently owns the Einstein collection is currently uploading high-res pictures of his scientific works, letters on social […]
The amazing properties of graphene are being put to use more and more, as Evan Reed and Mitchell Ong from the Stanford School of Engineering have described a new way of engineering piezoelectrics into graphene. The study was published in the ACS Nano Journal. When you apply a mechanical stress to certain materials, such as […]
Last September the whole scientific community was set ablaze by a the controversial claim set forth by CERN scientists, part of the OPERA experiment, in which they announced that they had measured neutrinos traveling at a velocity faster than the speed of light – 60 nanoseconds faster to be more exact. The implications of this […]
The human brain is wired to see all kinds of patterns in various shapes. The most common one is that of the human face, most often encountered in our day to day lives, be it in the coffee, a fire hidrant or a cut off potato (I saw Jesus!). The moon makes no exception either. […]
Atomic clocks are the current most accurate time and frequency standards, capable of operating with an uncertity of only a second in millions of years. A new research currently in the work by scientist from the University of New South Wales seeks to track time with an unprecedented accuracy of a mere 20th a second in […]
A group of researchers at MIT have successfully managed to create a light emitting diode (LED) that has an electrical efficiency greater than 100%. This might sound preposterous, and against everything you learned in physics, however the system is still governed by fundamental laws of thermodynamics. This extraordinary power conversion efficiency was obtained by a […]
In what’s arguable the most important physics discovery ever to come out of China, and a perfect example of “by the book” international collaborative effort, researchers report they’ve successfully identified the last piece of missing information needed to describe the mysterious neutrino oscillation. For a long time, scientists have been trying to discover how neutrinos […]
A Romanian scientist working at the University of Ohio captured the first-ever images of atoms moving within a molecule by applying a novel technique which basically turns the electrons of a molecule into flashbulbs; while this is currently only a new way to visualize molecules, researchers believe that one day it will be the key […]
Since they were first introduced more than 70 years ago, electron microscopes have aided researchers from a diverse array of fields of science reach some of the world’s greatest scientific breakthroughs – most often they’ve been considered indispensable. They’ve well reached their limits, however, and University of Sheffield researchers sought to find an alternate route for sub-atomic imaging. […]
The biggest manhunt in physics history is steadily closing in on its target. Wanted – Higgs boson, also known as the God Particle. Reason – explain why objects have mass and provide “missing link” for standard model of physics. Sketch portrait – mass around 125 GeV. Last seen – Fermilab Tevatron particle accelerator. If you […]
Xinwei Wang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State studies thermal conductivity – and he had a funny feeling about spiders; so he ordered eight spiders — Nephila clavipes, golden silk orbweavers — and put them to work eating crickets and spinning webs in the cages he set up. Wang has been looking for organic […]
Ground robots are currently typically deployed by the US military in various explosive-ordinance-disposal missions. However, robots are currently unable to fulfill their potential across a greater range of missions mostly due to issues regarding mobility and manipulation. However, DARPA is trying hard to face those obstacles, and when they team up with Boston Dynamics, you […]
Part of a the recent slew of revolutionary technological and scientific novelties coming off IBM‘s research and development lab, the company has just announced that it has successfully managed to measure and image for the first time how charge is distributed within a single molecule. The achievement was made possible after a new technique, called Kelvin probe force microscopy […]
It looks like not all is going bad for Italian researchers, after the trial of the seismologists: physicists from Italy have discovered the first evidence of a nucleus that doesn’t exist in nature and survives only for 10-10 seconds when created in a laboratory. Strange matter Hypernuclei contain all sorts of protons and neutrons, but […]
Space offers incredibly fascinating experimental conditions for various scientific studies, otherwise very hard or practically impossible to replicate on Earth. Microgravity is something of great interest to scientists, and even simple experiments with fire are extremely insightful. Combustion in space occurs at much lower temperatures and with a lower amount of required oxygen, and to […]
In the popular TV series, Star Trek, one of the most fascinating devices featured, out of the whole myriad of blasters and tractor beams, is the tricorder, a portable medical scanner and communication device which could detect biological phenomena such as increased blood flow around tumorous growths just by sweeping a person. The closest thing […]
The much dreamed off invisibility cloak is just a few tiny steps away, after remarkable research in the field, many backed by military interests, have sparked some amazing advances. In the last few years alone, scientists have managed to successfully cloak various objects either using meta-materials that bent light around an object to conceal it or […]
University of Bristol scientists have developed a magnetic soap, which basically is a common soap only it’s filled with iron atoms that causes the targeted waste material to become magnetized. The detergent has a real potential of revolutionizing how mega clean-ups will be handled in the future. An oil spill could be cleaned a lot […]
Researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have used the world’s most powerful X-ray laser fired upon a neon gas capsule and thus emit an avalanche of short wavelength X-rays,creating the first atom laser. The same laser was used to heat a lump of matter at over 2 million degrees Fahrenheit – hotter than the sun’s […]
By harnessing the science of both quantum and nano physics, scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute have come up with an innovative new way of cooling semiconductor membranes by using laser light. Through this new technique, the researchers were able to cool the tiny, thin membrane from room temperature to -269 degrees Celsius. Paradoxically, the […]
Graphene is starting to show its really interesting and exciting properties; recently, scientists have managed to put together two separate properties which usually don’t go together: it is iridescent like a butterfly’s wing, and superhydrophobic, like a rose petal or this material. The engineered surface could have applications in liquid transportation and analysis, or due […]
Ever since researchers started studying the Earth’s spin, they noticed that the spin isn’t perfect. Many believe this is a result of the different elements in the Earth’s core, mantle and crust, which have different densities and generate different friction. Most researchers studying this wobble agreed that the mantle would have to respond to the […]
Black Holes are the least understood entities, so far, in the Universe. However, if there’s one thing scientists know for sure about them, it’s that they’re the most extreme environment in cosmos. Black Holes have such a powerful, relentless gravity pull that it swallows absolutely everything in its vicinity, even light gets absorbed with zero […]
A team of researchers predicted the next big thing in the world of particle physics: super symmetry, or Susy. The Higgs boson is the standing stone of modern particle physics, but it is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding our Universe, and according to Howard Baer, Homer L. Dodge Professor of […]
Moore’s law states that the processing power of computers doubles approximately every two years; as prices fall and manufacturing technology increases, researchers have now shown that wires just a few nanometres wide conduct electricity in the same way as their larger counterparts, rather than being affected by quantum mechanics – a result which surprised many […]
Cloaking used to be one of my favorite SciFi themes. James Bond supercars that would show up or disappear instantly at the flick of an alarm key, the hallow man, objects rendered completely invisible to the human eye and lost in the surroundings. I say used to be because spatial cloaking has transcended for some […]
The big news about the discovery of the Higgs boson seem farther than some might have expected, even though researchers reported ‘tantalizing hints’ of the elusive particle; physicists will have to hold their breath a little longer. About a week ago, rumors started stirring up the physics world, as the people at CERN zoomed in […]
Isaac Newton is one of the most influential figures in physics, the first to stipulate the fundamental laws of motion and gravity, among many other breakthroughs. Now, anyone can come closer to understanding how Newton first discovered planetary motion or stated his three fundamental principles by reading his own personal notes, recently digitized and released […]
The physicists over at CERN set out to determine if the Higgs Boson is real or not, and they seem poised to figure that out, as rumor spreads about the possible announcement of the elusive particle. Recently, rumors about the boson exploded, and instead of cooling down, they amplified even more; this Tuesday (tomorrow, 13th […]
Does flicking a dice really render a random face? The answer would be no. The dice is governed by large-scale conventional physics and its motion, and thus final position can be determined. You can’t tell where it lands just by looking at it thwirl, of course, but the fact remains it’s not random, and neither […]
I recently came across this interview with Prof. Dr. Siegfried Bethke, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Munich, posted at Physorg, and just had to share it, because it is incredibly interesting: Professor Bethke, particles have been colliding with each other at the LHC for two years now, the detectors have so […]
The great part of Earth’s liquid outer core comprises of molten iron, which is just swell for us and every inhabitant of our planet, because this layer generates a magnetic field which protects us from radiation which would be lethal. But common accepted theory suggests that there should also be some lighter ingredients down there, […]
An international team of researchers working in Italy recently conducted a study which concluded that the revolutionary results claimed by their colleagues at CERN may be faulty. They studied the same neutrino particles reported to travel faster than light and claim their test clearly shows this is wrong. The announcement was made in September, and […]
