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The idea which states that nothing can travel faster than light is a corner stone of modern day physics, upon which scientists have built up models and theories of how the world, the Universe, works. If the statement is proven to be false, than our understanding of physics becomes undermined, and as such needs to […]
The Moon still holds numerous unanswered questions, and among these, perhaps the most interesting is the one regarding its lost magnetism. Why is it that the Moon had magnetism? Now, two teams working separately seem to have found two complementary explanations. Rock magnetism It all started when the Apollo missions brought back samples of moon […]
A very intriguing theory says that the Vikings used to navigate through traitorous Arctic waters, and possibly even through the Atlatic towards North America, by using a coveted mineral called the “sunstone“. These glowing, fabled stones used to guide the northsmen by revealing the position of the sun even when it was obscured by cloud […]
Trekkies might rejoice at the news that NASA has recently decided to fund a research group employed to study how tractor beam technology might become applicable in space exploration missions. The agency has awarded a $100,000 initial grant to a team of reserachers who will study three experimental techniques involving capturing small-particle samples with lasers. […]
Developing safe, reliable, compact, and cost-effective hydrogen storage technologies is one of the most technically challenging barriers to the widespread use of hydrogen as a form of energy. Hydrogen is a great fuel, and if used in perfect conditions it can power numerous applications. However, with today’s tech a hydrogen powered car can’t even travel […]
In the aftermath of September’s highly controversial announcement, that a particle with a speed larger than that of the light was recorded, CERN has announced that it has been re-running the experiment, in order to test the validity of the first. Now of course, when you claim you have a neutrino going faster than the […]
Water is everywhere on Earth – that’s easy to see for anybody. But why and how it got here, that’s a dilemma that until now, hasn’t been fully answered. A new comet study has shown how a ring of cold water vapor can encircle a young planet, while another related one explains a hailstorm of […]
What you just saw in the video above is a perfect demonstration of the quantum levitation effect, through a fairly simple set-up made by Tel Aviv University scientists, comprised of a track and a semiconductor. The quantum levitation is actually a perfect demonstration of the Meissner effect, which describes the expulsion of a magnetic field […]
Ever since the physics experiment which recorded neutrinos traveling slightly faster than light have set the scientific world ablaze, and since then, over 80 possible explanations have emerged. While some claim that these results pave the way for a totally different set of laws of physics, many offer less revolutionary solutions to the problem. The […]
The most popular video sharing website in the world, YouTube, has teamed up with NASA and several other key figures from the scientific community to launch YouTube Space Lab, a global effort challenging students between the ages of 14 and 18 to design an experiment that can be conducted in space. I know there are […]
A whole lot of people have been closely following the developments at the Large Hadron Collider, but now, all that may become a whole lot easier, thanks to an Android based application which allows users to see the latest colliding protons, among others, at the world’s largest particle accelerator, located at the French/Swiss border. LHSee, […]
A grad student from the prestigious college has created an actual flying carpet, that moves thanks to “ripple power waves” that come from an electrical current which are driven forward from air packets. At the moment, the device moves at only 1 cm per second, but it is only the first prototype, and can be […]
If harnessed at a much greater potential than it is now, sunlight might not only become the primary source of energy on the planet, but the cheapest too. In one hour the sun sprays our planet with enough energy to power all the electrical needs of the word for an entire YEAR. Now that’s something […]
Last week, ground shattering news hit the scientific community worldwide when CERN announced that their experiments showed that neutrinos fired from the CERN laboratory in Geneva, reached their destination of Gran Sasso, Italy, 60 billionths of a second faster than they would have if they had been traveling exactly at the speed of light. CERN […]
The Slinky is one of the most popular toys in the world, being used by children in the playroom and NASA scientists trying to demonstrate physical principles, alike. Surprisingly or not, slinky springs are filled with even more secrets of physics besides simple energy and momentum releases. For example, in these two incredibly entertaining videos […]
What’s maybe the most shocking announcement for the scientific community this whole millennium came earlier today from Geneva, when scientists at CERN dropped the bomb shell according to which they’ve managed to break the speed of light barrier. If their three years study of measurements with re-checks upon re-checks proves to be valid, than the […]
Researchers have reached what can only be described as a crucial milestone that opens the way for a new class of materials with amazing electronic properties. Superconductivity is a relatively recently discovered feat, in which conducting materials oppose exactly zero resistance when electric current passes through them, below a certain temperature. Like ferromagnetism and atomic […]
Stephen Hawking may have just won the most outrageous bet in physics history, a few years ago, when he claimed that the LHC, along with every other particle accelerator won’t find the Higgs boson, the elusive ‘God particle‘, simply because it does not exist. When he addressed this bet, Peter Higgs, who proposed and supported […]
As space agencies around the world, predominantly NASA, are considering building outposts outside Earth for the most likely far distant future, various difficulties need to be cared for. One of the most bugging and precarious one is the matter of energy generation. Without energy, you don’t have electricity to power labs, green houses, you can’t […]
A team of Hong Kong scientists have proven that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum, at the same time crushing a dream concluding that time travel is simply impossible. Time travel has been a central theme for science fiction for many years, moving minds and imagination to all sort of […]
CERN researchers have announced this Friday that they may had caught a glimpse of the fabled Higgs Boson particle, also known as the “God Particle”. Scientists have the news during the 2011 Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics (HEP 2011), which opened Thursday in Grenoble, France. This came after two collision detector teams (Atlas and CMS), […]
Scientists at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider on Wednesday voiced excitement about the observation of a new particle. The new particle, called Xi-sub-b, was first theorized by the Standard Model which predicted that the neutral particle should exist. Now, through a process which involved high-speed collisions in the Fermilab Tevatron particle accelerator in Batavi, a three-story […]
The relatively new theory of plate tectonics is still uncertain about what is the driving force behind the tectonic movement; now, scientists working at the Kamioka Liquid-Scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) and the Borexino Detector believe they are close to finding out the answer to that question, after using neutrino detectors and measuring the flow of […]
Physics is still not sure what to make of antimatter; theoretically speaking, after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts. But if this is the case, then where is all the antimatter ? Matter vs antimatter An antiparticle has exactly the same mass as a particle, but a opposite electrical charge, […]
It always baffles me to see how science news propagate; it seems whenever a study or a report is published, there are two waves of acknowledgement: the first one, science sites and magazines write about it, and the second one, the supermassive one, where the media picks it up. This is exactly the case here. […]
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) continues on its quest to find out exactly what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang, unveiling what is the densest material known so far to man. Exotic densest substance Known as the quark-gluon plasma, this amazing exotic substance can exist only at incredibly high temperatures or pressures, […]
Graphene is probably the ‘substance of the century’, and it will probably be for us what plastics were in the 1900s. Now, a flower-like defect in the material that can occur during the fabrication process could have a significant effect on graphene’s already impressive mechanical, magnetic, and electrical properties. Amazing graphene Graphene is practically a […]
In an exclusive interview with The Guardian, the eminent British physicist Stephen Hawking shared his view upon fatality and the afterlife, sparking a wave of criticism from creationists and religious personalities as he bluntly stated that the concept of heaven is simply a “fairy story” for people who fear death. How does Hawking explain his […]
The team operating the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland reported storing antimatter for approximately 1000 seconds, which might not seem like much of a big deal, but it is about 10.000 times longer than the previous record ! A cloud of antihydrogen This study will hopefully reveal more […]
The quantum world is entirely different from what we see around us; it has its own laws, its own algebra, etc. It’s a really bizarre place, but that can yield wonderous developments as well. Since the quantum laws are so different, it’s hard to actually observe them, so instead, thought experiments are used. But for […]
We already know about numerous extremophiles, microbes that can live in incredibly extreme conditions, which would easily kill almost every other creature. There are bacteria which survive in extremely high or low temperatures, in substances with an extreme pH, surrounded by nothing but solid rock, in the depths of the ocean, and so on. But […]
The world scientific community is absolutely abuzz with the rumour that the Higgs boson, the elusive God particle, may have just been detected. The rumour started after an internal note was leaked from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); it’s not yet exactly clear if the memo is authentic, but it seems real enough to have […]
I was telling you a while ago about the revolutionary material called graphene. Graphene is a one atom thick layer of carbon packed in a honeycomb lattice. Now, a team led by Professor Andre Geim, recipient of the Nobel Prize for graphene, showed that electric current (which is basically a flow of electrons) can magnetise […]
The world we live in is getting closer and closer to Star Trek everyday. Scientists announced today they were able to teleport special bits of light from one place to another. While this doesn’t mean that we will be (ever) able to teleport people, it involves some pretty awesome mind bending physics. Teleportation relies on […]
Yellowstone is without a doubt one of the most fascinating places on the face of the planet. But it doesn’t only attract families or people who want to relax, but it attracts scientists as well, and among them, geologists and geophysicists hold a top spot. University of Utah researchers made the first large-scale picture of […]
Big guns and big boats go well hand in hand most of the time, and the latest experimental weaponry unveiled by the US Navy, dubbed the Maritime Laser Demonstrator (MLD), will be sure to please any old sea dog. The diode-pumped solid-state high-energy laser weapon was developed by Northrop Grumman, and its capabilities were demonstrated […]
It’s not that uncommon for two stars to dance, but when three of them get together, and dance without singing, now that’s something uncommon. What do I mean ? Well, binary star systems are not really only in Star Wars, they’re quite common throughout the galaxy, but as it turns out, trinary systems might not […]
The LHC isn’t the only particle accelerator doing serious business these days; scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have managed to achieve something that was previously thought to be impossible. In that way, the title is a bit misleading – you cannot really break a […]
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has started doing some serious business. This time, an extremely rare particle containing equal parts of matter and antimatter popped up during experiments at the world’s largest and hottest particle accelerator. The particle, named a B meson is made out of one quark (the building blocks of protons […]
In a world where the king words are ‘buy low, sell high’, speed is of upmost importance. Stock trading has become more and more reliant on modern ways of transmitting and processing information, and in this process, fiber optic plays a crucial role. While fiber optic does work at 90 percent the speed of light, […]
Quantum computers – closer thank you think The microprocessors used today are absolutely amazing on their own; it seemed, and for good reason, that there was little we could do to improve them. If anything was to top microprocessors, it would have to be something from a totally different league, which is just down […]
Scientists have dusted and cleaned some X-Ray equipment dating shortly after the discovery of the rays in 1895 and found that it creates some images of stunning quality, compared to its age and simple construction. However, the machine requires a radiation level of 1500 times bigger than a modern X-Ray. The machine, developed by school […]
The situation in Japan is far from calming down; the 9.0 earthquake and the tsunamis it triggered unleashed a chain of events which keep pointing towards a future that can only be dire. In his first official statement since the event, emperor Akihito says events at Fukushima are unpredictable, and he stated that he is […]
It’s been a while since we wrote something about the Large Hadron Collider, but this time, some researchers from the LHC come back with a jaw dropping theory – time travel. If this latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is correct, than the LHC would be the world’s first machine able to […]
The damage caused by the 8.9 earthquake in Japan is far from being over – asa matter of fact, unfortunately, it may very well just be starting. The earthquake and the tsunamis it created cut down power supply throughout a major part of Japan, and so the cooling system of several power plants was unable to […]
We probably all know (especially thanks to the abundancy of TV series) what Crime Scene Investigators (CSI) are. Probably not so many people know exactly what geophysics is. As the name says it (geo=earth), geophysics studies the phyisical properties of the Earth, such as gravity, electromagnetism, plate tectonics, and extremely numerous other ones; it is […]
Researchers from the Oxford University have outdone themselves, successfully generating 10 billion bits of quantum entanglement in silicon for the first time, which represents a significant step towards an ultrafast quantum computer, because entanglement is the key element that should make quantum computers way more powerful than “traditional” computers. In order to achieve this, the […]
Superfluidity is a weird property, by all standards. Basically it is a state of matter in which all the viscosity of a fluid vanishes; what happes is you take some atoms, and you chill them, and then chill them some more, until they get close to absolute zero (-273.15 degrees Celsius, the temperature below which […]
In case you’re wondering, what you’re looking at is a silicon chip, only 1 millimeter square that was used by researchers to prove how data can be stored in the magnetic spin of atoms – and how it can then be accessed electronically. Physicists from the University of Utah have managed to store information in […]
A team led by Sandia National Laboratories researcher Jianyu Huang created the smallest battery in the world, with a single nanowire 7000 times thinner than a human hair as an anode. The battery was formed inside a transmission electron microscope (TEM) at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) to allow researchers to better understand the […]
