Physics

While filming herself getting ready for work recently, TikTok user @gracie.ham reached deep into the ancient foundations of mathematics and found an absolute gem of a question: “How could someone come up with a concept like algebra?” She also asked what the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras might have used mathematics for, and other questions that

It’s like something out of Stranger Things, but with fewer Demogorgons and less of the sinister darkness: physicists have flipped reality on its head, creating their own ‘upside down’ by getting small boats to float underneath a levitating liquid. Seeing it in action, you would think you were watching some kind of sci-fi movie effect,

Keeping qubits stable – those quantum equivalents of classic computing bits – will be key to realising the potential of quantum computing. Now scientists have found a new obstacle to this stability: natural radiation. Natural or background radiation comes from all sorts of sources, both natural and artificial. Cosmic rays contribute to natural radiation, for

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Perhaps not, some say. And if someone is there to hear it? If you think that means it obviously did make a sound, you might need to revise that opinion. We have found a new

What happens to materials in Earth’s crust when a meteorite slams into them? Specifically, what happens to the quartz found in many different rock types? Scientists thought they already knew the answer – but new lab tests suggest we might have to think again. In the absence of any imminent meteorite strikes, researchers used a

For the first time, pressure over 100 times that found in Earth’s core has been generated in a lab, setting a new record. Using the highest-energy laser system in the world, physicists briefly subjected solid hydrocarbon samples to pressures up to 450 megabars, meaning 450 million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level. That’s equivalent

A pair of Danish computer scientists have solved a longstanding mathematics puzzle that lay dormant for decades, after researchers failed to make substantial progress on it since the 1990s. The abstract problem in question is part of what’s called graph theory, and specifically concerns the challenge of finding an algorithm to resolve the planarity of

The existence of time crystals – a particularly fascinating state of matter – was only confirmed a few short years ago, but physicists have already made a pretty major breakthrough: they have induced and observed an interaction between two time crystals. In a helium-3 superfluid, two time crystals exchanged quasiparticles without disrupting their coherence; an

One of the major challenges in turning quantum technology from potential to reality is getting super-delicate quantum states to last longer than a few milliseconds – and scientists just raised the bar by a factor of about 10,000. They did it by tackling something called decoherence: that’s the disruption from surrounding noise caused by vibrations, fluctuations

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have cultivated a close relationship with fire. But for all our fascination and intimacy, both with its dangers and its uses, fire can still stun us with something we’ve never seen before. The blue whirl flame was discovered quite by accident just a few years ago. Scientists were

The idea of freezing particles by warming them is counterintuitive, to say the least. But physicists have shown how specially designed mixtures ‘melt’ in the dark but crystallise the moment the lights come on, thanks to their unique thermal activity. Instead of bouncing the particles around and spreading them out, the researchers showed that by

You wouldn’t think there’s much of a contest between soft hair or a little bit of beard stubble and a sharp steel razor – and yet, most of us know razors quickly lose their sharpness no matter how carefully you shave. Now scientists have a much better idea why this is happening at the smallest

Scientists can use some pretty wild forces to manipulate materials. There’s acoustic tweezers, which use the force of acoustic radiation to control tiny objects. Optical tweezers made of lasers exploit the force of light. Not content with that, now physicists have made a device to manipulate materials using the force of… nothingness. OK, that may be a

The Lebanese capital Beirut was rocked on Tuesday evening local time by an explosion that has killed at least 78 people and injured thousands more. The country’s prime minister Hassan Diab said the blast was caused by around 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored near the city’s cargo port. Video footage appears to show a

An explosion at a port in Beirut brought destruction to the Lebanese capital Tuesday, damaging buildings, killing more than a hundred people, and injuring thousands of others. People recorded videos showing the blast wave and a towering red cloud that some compared to a nuclear weapon’s mushroom cloud. The exact cause of the blast is

When an enormous explosion created a mushroom cloud over Beirut, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, online commentators and conspiracy theorists quickly jumped to a frightening claim: A nuclear bomb had gone off in Lebanon’s capital city. But as state officials say, and contrary to those fast-spreading rumours, the explosion was almost certainly not caused

Longer-lasting, more efficient batteries would be a boost for everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, and scientists have now made an unexpected discovery that could help develop next-gen battery tech, as well as faster catalysts and other advanced materials. An analysis of the very earliest stages of lithium battery charging – known as nucleation –

Here’s the story – our protagonist rewinds history, locates baby Hitler, and averts global war by putting him on a path to peace … but, oh noes! This sets off a domino chain of events that stops our hero from being born, or worse, kicks off the apocalypse. Unintended ‘butterfly effect‘-style consequences of time travel might be

This stunning image captured last year by physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland is the first-ever photo of quantum entanglement – a phenomenon so strange, physicist Albert Einstein famously described it as ‘spooky action at a distance’. It might not look like much, but just stop and think about it for a second:

Nearly a century after experiments confirmed that atoms, matter’s smallest building blocks, have ethereal, wave-like characteristics, physicists have just found a new way to show how mammoth-sized molecules ripple with the same uncertainty. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, put a new spin on a classic experiment to create

Energy generated from nuclear fusion holds plenty of potential as a clean and almost limitless source of power, but many obstacles need to be overcome before it’s a practical reality – and scientists may have just clambered over another one. New models of an unwanted fusion phenomenon called ‘chirping’, where vital heat can be lost

Last year, scientists detected the most energetic gamma ray burst we’ve ever seen. A distant galaxy spat out a colossal flare in the range of a trillion electron volts (TeV), providing invaluable new insight into the physics of these incredibly energetic events. That was pretty amazing on its own – but now astrophysicists have used

There’s a new exotic subatomic particle on the atom smasher. Physicists working with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration have found a new form of the elusive four-quark particle called a tetraquark that they have never seen before. The newly identified particle is made up of four quarks of the same flavour and is

Picture in your mind the delta of a river – the way the main channel splits into smaller rivulets and tributaries. Something similar occurs in waves as they propagate through a certain kind of medium: the path of the wave splits, breaking up into smaller channels like the branches of a tree. This is called

In the strange field of quantum physics, quantum entanglement – what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” – stands out as one of the most intriguing phenomena. And now scientists just managed to successfully demonstrate it again, this time onboard a CubeSat satellite orbiting Earth. Quantum entanglement is where two particles become inextricably linked

Every second, trillions upon trillions of incredibly low-mass subatomic particles called neutrinos shoot out from the Sun and slide undetected through your body. These neutrinos are produced by the two known types of fusion reactions that happen in our Sun, and up until now scientists have only detected one group of them – the neutrinos

A 50-year-old theoretical process for extracting energy from a rotating black hole finally has experimental verification. Using an analogue of the components required, physicists have shown that the Penrose process is indeed a plausible mechanism to slurp out some of that rotational energy – if we could ever develop the means. That’s not likely, but

Deep beneath the mountains of Gran Sasso in Italy, the world’s most sensitive dark matter experiment has made a surprise detection. No, it’s not dark matter. Instead, the experiment has detected significantly more particle interaction events than predicted by the standard model of particle physics. Instead of the 232 ± 15 low-energy events expected in

It’s easy to take time’s arrow for granted – but the gears of physics actually work just as smoothly in reverse. Maybe that time machine is possible after all? An experiment from 2019 shows just how much wiggle room we can expect when it comes to distinguishing the past from the future, at least on

A liquid phase originally proposed in the 1910s has finally been realised. Using a liquid crystal compound, scientists have discovered a new “ferroelectric nematic” phase that could open up an entire new class of materials and technological advances. There are many phases of liquid crystal, but one of the most common is the nematic phase.

In July of 2018, NASA announced an incredible achievement. They had created the coldest spot in space – right there on the International Space Station, in orbit around Earth. They took atoms of a soft metal called rubidium, and cooled them to temperatures around 100 nanoKelvin – one ten-millionth of a Kelvin above absolute zero.

The famous cat-in-a-box thought experiment by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger is an illustration of one of the defining characteristics of quantum mechanics – the unpredictable behaviour of particles at the quantum level. It makes working with quantum systems incredibly difficult; but what if we could make quantum predictions? A team of physicists believes it’s possible.

It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, but the newly revealed Shadow-Effect Energy Generator (SEG) is a real prototype device. The fascinating concept could help us to transform the way renewable energy is generated indoors. The SEG uses the contrast between darkness and light to produce electricity. It’s made up of a series of

When it comes to putting the lighter elements of the periodic table under high pressure, nitrogen seems to be the odd one out. While oxygen, boron, and carbon all change structure according to a specific pattern, nitrogen does not, a glaring anomaly scientists have struggled to resolve. A new finding reveals nitrogen may not be

While it probably won’t make it to your dining table, a new scientific achievement might be able to help in everything from radar equipment to electric cars: scientists have been able to form salt, aka sodium chloride (NaCl), in a hexagonal shape. This is work done at the smallest of scales, with researchers able to get

Quantum physicists have set a new record for collecting a persistent group of entangled atoms together, getting 15 trillion atoms to co-exist in a “hot and messy” cloud of gas. Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon at the heart of quantum physics, where two particles can mysteriously influence each other, no matter what the distance is

Every time tabloids and social media dramatically mishandle a science news story, the urge to unplug the internet and plug it back in again is excruciatingly strong. If you’ve heard the recent claim that NASA detected a parallel universe (!) in Antarctica (!) where time runs backwards (!!), we’re glad you’ve now clicked on this

Graphene has already proven itself to be a weird and wonderful material in many different ways, but its properties get even more unusual and exotic when it’s twisted – and two new studies have given scientists a much closer look at this intriguing phenomenon. When two sheets of graphene are put together at slightly different

You might not know the term ‘oobleck’, but it’s highly likely you came across it as a kid. Also known as a non-Newtonian fluid, the strange material sometimes behaves like a liquid, and sometimes acts like a solid. It’s usually made of corn-starch and water, and it produces hours of fun for children everywhere. Punch it

Scientists have observed a quantum vibration at normal room temperature for the first time, a phenomenon that usually requires ultra-cold, carefully calibrated conditions – bringing us another step closer to understanding the behaviour of quantum mechanics in common materials. The team was able to spot a phonon, a quantum particle of vibration generated from high-frequency

You might be familiar with the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, where the eponymous feline in a box can be both alive or dead at the same time, often used to illustrate the multi-state paradox of quantum mechanics. Well, now scientists have managed to apply that theory to huge molecules made up of 2,000 atoms. Quantum

From smartphones to electric cars, we’re going to continue to need plenty of batteries in the years to come. New research shows how an upgraded type of aluminium battery could offer several advantages over the traditional lithium-ion ones in use today. The battery has low production costs, and doesn’t take the same environmental toll as

Superconductivity (passing charges through materials without losing heat) promises to revolutionise electronics and power, if we can get it working at reasonable temperatures – and scientists just reported a big step forward in our understanding of the phenomenon. The new discovery centres around the Hubbard model: a maths model of conduction and insulation in materials,

For several years now, physicists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) have been running a landmark experiment, recording tens of billions of particles break apart in the hopes of catching a few oddballs. And they finally have some intriguing results to share. This experiment, called NA62, has researchers building and destroying pairs of quarks called

A huge experiment to pin down the mass of one of the Universe’s most perplexing particles has put a cap on how big the neutrino might actually be. Once considered massless, the particle’s mass is now thought to weigh no more than a single electronvolt. It might not be a precise answer, but it does

You might think you already know black – even super-black Vantablack, previously the blackest material known to science – but researchers just came up with a material that takes black to a new level of blackness. The new, as-yet-unnamed ultra-black material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs), microscopic carbon strings that are a

A fifty-year-old hypothesis predicting the existence of bodies dubbed Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs) is getting a second look in light of a proposed correction to assumptions we use to model the way our Universe expands. If this new version of a classic cosmological model is correct, some black holes could hide cores of pure

Protons probably aren’t quite as big as we’d once imagined, according to the results of a sensitive physics experiment that took eight years to complete. Scientists now say our earlier measurements of proton size were off by as much as 5 percent – which might not seem like such a huge correction, but to physicists