Recent CERN experiments have once again validated a prediction of the standard model. This is embarrassing for scientists, as they are looking for experimental clues of limits of the standard model. Standard model is known not to explain everything. More about these alternative models below (source Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.

Pulling on a knitted scarf can stretch it to twice its length, even though the thread it’s knitted from hardly elongates. Knitting is a timeworn craft, at least a thousand years old, but no satisfactory account of the mechanics of its stretchiness exists. New theoretical work describes how individual

Benham's top, also called Benham's disk, is named after the English newspaper-man, amateur scientist, and toymaker Charles Benham, who in 1895 sold a top painted with the pattern shown. When the disk is spun, arcs of pale color, called Fechner colors or pattern-induced flicker colors (PIFCs)

Despite numerous studies and 30-plus genomes under their belts, scientists are still struggling to nail down the defining traits of these tall, long-lived, woody plants. https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2018/what-makes-tree-tree HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16792726

Trapped in the rigid structure of diamonds formed deep in the Earth's crust, scientists have discovered a form of water ice that was not previously known to occur naturally on our planet. The finding, published Thursday in Science, represents the first detection of naturally occurring ice-VII ever found

Here are two thought experiments about thermodynamics that can puzzle uninitiated minds: the Brownian ratchet and Maxwell's daemon. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Brownian ratchet In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, the Brownian ratchet or Feynman-Smoluchowski ratchet is a thought experiment about an apparent perpetual motion machine first analysed