Science

A collection of 58 posts

Science

Inside the Proton, the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’ (Quanta Magazine)

More than a century after Ernest Rutherford discovered the positively charged particle at the heart of every atom, physicists are still struggling to fully understand the proton. High school physics teachers describe them as featureless balls with one unit each of positive electric charge — the perfect foils for the negatively

Science

Why Does Pepperoni Curl? (Serious Eats)

(…) There are times when I'll head into a bog-standard New York slice joint, see those pre-cooked squares with their flat disks of pepperoni, watch some poor sap order them, and think to myself: Ah, you've fallen victim to one of the two classic blunders, the most famous of which is

Science

Zanclean flood (Wikipedia)

The Zanclean flood or Zanclean deluge is a flood theorized to have refilled the Mediterranean Sea 5.33 million years ago. (…) The Mediterranean Basin flooded mostly during a period estimated to have been between several months and two years. Sea level rise in the basin may have reached rates at

Science

Massive Black Holes Shown to Act Like Quantum Particles (Quanta Magazine)

When two black holes collide, the titanic crash ripples out through the very fabric of the cosmos. Physicists have used Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to predict the rough contours of these gravitational waves as they pass through Earth, and wave after wave has been confirmed by the LIGO

Science

Climat : mon cerveau fait l'autruche (Arte)

Pourquoi, en dépit de l'imminence de la catastrophe climatique, ne parvenons-nous pas à changer nos modes de vie ? Y a-t-il une explication scientifique à cette inertie ? Réponse dans cette riche enquête qui révèle les surprenants réflexes du cerveau humain. "Devant le danger, nous avons tendance à mettre la tête dans

Science

Equium: la thermoacoustique pour démocratiser les pompes à chaleur

La société Equium développe un procédé permettant d'améliorer le fonctionnement des pompes à chaleur (PAC) actuelles. En exploitant les propriétés thermodynamiques d'ondes acoustiques intenses, il deviendrait possible de se passer de fluides réfrigérants polluants ainsi que de certaines parties mobiles dans les PAC. Si le projet franchit avec succès son

Science

The Joule-Thomson Effect and The Models We Know (Matt Ferraro)

Here's a brain teaser that seems easy but is actually very hard: We've got a cylinder split in half by a diaphragm. On the left side is some Helium gas at 0°C and 1 atmosphere of pressure. On the right side is a perfect vacuum. We're going to snap

Science

The chase for fusion energy (Nature)

(…) Long derided as a prospect that is forever 30 years away, nuclear fusion seems finally to be approaching commercial viability. There are now more than 30 private fusion firms globally, according to an October survey by the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) in Washington DC, which represents companies in the sector;

Science

Teplator: heat cities with spent nuclear rods (DW)

Czech researchers develop revolutionary nuclear heating plant –  A team of scientists has come up with a radical solution to heat cities using spent nuclear rods, which they say is cost-effective and greener than natural gas. As the EU moves away from coal, many are interested. Almost every major city in

Science

Why does it take so long to get to Mercury? (ESA)

Earth is on average ten times closer to Mercury than Jupiter, but missions to both planets can take a similar amount of time to reach their science orbits. Why is that? (…) The energy our spacecraft needs to shed is on a completely different scale to using brakes to slow down

Science

Graphene sandwiches that form moiré superconductors (Quanta Magazine)

An unexpected superconductor was beginning to look like a fluke, but a new theory and a second discovery have revealed that emergent quasiparticles may be behind the effect. (…) Two papers published in the journals Nature and Science described (…) a three-layer graphene sandwich with the “bread” sheets aligned and the filling

Science

The strange fate of a person falling into a black hole (BBC Earth)

It could happen to anyone. Maybe you're out trying to find a new habitable planet for the human race, or maybe you're just on a long walk and you slip. Whatever the circumstances, at some point we all find ourselves confronted with the age-old question: what happens when you fall

Science

Firing Lasers to Tame the Sky (Astronomy Picture of the Day)

> Why do stars twinkle? Our atmosphere is to blame as pockets of slightly off-temperature air, in constant motion, distort the light paths from distant astronomical objects. Atmospheric turbulence is a problem for astronomers because it blurs the images of the sources they want to study. The telescope featured in this

Science

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine (Bert Hubert)

Welcome! In this post, we’ll be taking a character-by-character look at the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine. (…) Now, these words may be somewhat jarring - the vaccine is a liquid that gets injected in your arm. How can we talk about source code? This is

Science

Squash kill shot (Darbois Texier)

In squash, it exists a perfect killing shot which is almost impossible to catch. It occurs when the ball hit an edge of the court. In this situation the ball exits at very low speed and rolls along the wall or the floor. With Caroline Cohen [http://www.researchgate.net/

Science

Ridiculous math problems (Quora)

(…) You may have seen such meme images before. They are always pure click-bait garbage: “95% of MIT graduates couldn’t solve this!”, where “this” is some inane, or ill-defined, or trivial brain teaser. This one is not. The meme is a clever, or wicked, joke. Roughly 99.999995% of the

Science

Aneutronic fusion (Wikipedia)

Aneutronic fusion is any form of fusion power in which the majority of the energy released is carried by charged particles. While the lowest-threshold nuclear fusion reactions release up to 80% of their energy in the form of (uncharged) neutrons, there also exist reactions in which the energy is released

Science

Are Aerospike Engines Better Than Traditional Rocket Engines? (Tim Dodd, Everyday Astronaut)

Ok, so you can’t really fire a vacuum optimized engine at sea level… and this, really, is where aerospikes come in. The idea behind aerospikes is you allow the ambient air pressure to actually form the walls containing the flow of the exhaust so it’s always in nearly

Science

Some people are able to control their acoustic reflex to mute sounds around them

Loud sounds can harm our ears, especially if the noise appears all of a sudden. It's because the so-called acoustic reflex [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_reflex] has not enough time to take effect. A car manufacturer has studied this phenomenon because drivers got ear injuries after car accidents.

Science

Breaking max efficiency of solar cells by activating 2 electrons with 1 photon (MIT news)

In any conventional silicon-based solar cell, there is an absolute limit on overall efficiency, based partly on the fact that each photon of light can only knock loose a single electron, even if that photon carried twice the energy needed to do so. But now, researchers have demonstrated a method

Science

Engineers create synthetic, sound-silencing structure that blocks 94% of sounds (Eurekalert)

Boston University researchers, Xin Zhang, a professor at the College of Engineering, and Reza Ghaffarivardavagh, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, released a paper in Physical Review B demonstrating it's possible to silence noise using an open, ringlike structure, created to mathematically perfect specifications, for cutting

Science

Lewis–Mogridge position: traffic expands to meet the available road space

The Lewis–Mogridge position, named after David Lewis and Martin J. H. Mogridge, was formulated in 1990 and observes that as more roads are built, more traffic consequently fills these roads. Speed gains from some new roads can disappear within months, if not weeks. Sometimes, new roads help to reduce

Science

About cookies, Skinner boxes and the addictive Candy Crush

A few days ago, near my office, there was a promotional event for some random brand of cookies. You could get a box for free, but only if you picked a winning ball in the mouth of a dragon statue. I lost, but a friend shared its cookies. While crunching

Science

Multi-armed bandit

In probability theory, the multi-armed bandit problem is a problem in which a fixed limited set of resources must be allocated between competing (alternative) choices in a way that maximizes their expected gain, when each choice's properties are only partially known at the time of allocation, and may become better

Science

Universal Quantum Phenomenon Found in Strange Metals

Experiments suggest that exotic superconducting materials share a “strange metal” state characterized by a quantum speed limit that somehow acts as a fundamental organizing principle. (...) The hypothesis is that electrons in strange metals might be “dissipating as quickly as they can consistent with the [Heisenberg] uncertainty principle,” Hartnoll explained. The