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Giving up the Ghost: Science Takes on the Supernatural

This Halloween, you are invited to spend the evening in a haunted house with a difference. At ZME Manor the supernatural meets the scientific. Which will survive? And what will be left of it?

What is entropy, and why is it always increasing?

Room's a mess again? It's physics's fault.

Butterfly wings are alive and double as hi-tech sensors

Nanostructures on the butterfly's wings are especially designed to protect living tissue inside them. This could inspire engineers to design more efficient heat shields.

Researchers create coldest molecules - colder than interstellar space

MIT researchers have managed to create incredibly cold molecules, much colder than even interstellar space. In this new experiment, sodium potassium (NaK) molecules were brought down to 500 nanokelvins, just a touch more than 0 Kelvin - the absolute lowest possible temperature.

Physicists create negative temperature state - thermodynamic laws still stand

Well, the year really kicked off in style. This research is really next level physics, and in order to understand it (even slightly), we’re going to delve into some serious physics. Dancing around absolute zero Over the years, physicists have made significant progress in cooling objects closer to absolute zero (0 Kelvin, the temperature at […]

Bacteria replicate close to the limit of thermodynamic efficiency

We often like to think us humans have achieved a remarkable standard of efficiency and development – but a look at the animal life around us is often enough to humble us. Replicating bacteria and physics The common gut bacteria, Escherichia coli (E. coli, in short) typically takes about 20 minutes to duplicate itself in […]

A novel technique cools electronic devices faster and cheaper

Researchers at  North Carolina State University have developed a new technique of cooling electronic devices which they claim and prove through their findings that it can lead to an increase of performance by improving the rate of heat exchange, while also lowering the cost of manufacturing. The scientists’ findings might lead to a new generation […]

MIT engineers create LED that has 230% efficiency. Thermodynamics laws still in place

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 […]

The minimum and maximum possible temperatures

Since the start of the year, I’ve received quite a few questions regarding absolute temperatures – highest and lowest, so I decided to start a brief discussion around the two values, in which I will give the basic facts about them, so feel free to step in and add more info or questions. Absolute zero […]