Science

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

Loud sounds can harm our ears, especially if the noise appears all of a sudden. It's because the so-called acoustic reflex has not enough time to take effect.A car manufacturer has studied

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

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

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

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 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,

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

Present an argument or formula which (even barely) predicts what the next prime number will be (in any given sequence of numbers), and your name will be forever linked to one of the

As reported in 1756 by Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost, volatile liquids on hot solids form “gleaming drops resembling quicksilver”, a consequence of their levitation on a vapour cushion.This makes the drops spectacularly mobile,

Surprisingly few software engineers and scientists seem to know about it, [even if] it is such a general and powerful tool for combining information in the presence of uncertainty. (...)You can use a

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

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,

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

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-treeHN

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

Here are two thought experiments about thermodynamics that can puzzle uninitiated minds: the Brownian ratchet and Maxwell's daemon.The Brownian ratchetIn the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, the Brownian ratchet or Feynman-Smoluchowski

Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit

The Thing, also known as the Great Seal bug, was one of the first covert listening devices (or "bugs") to use passive techniques to transmit an audio signal. It was concealed inside a

While there are lots of things that artificial intelligence can't do yet—science being one of them—neural networks are proving themselves increasingly adept at a huge variety of pattern recognition tasks. These

The contest between gravity and quantum physics takes a new turn.It is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems.At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature

Airplane contrails are real, but we know what they are: water vapor  and small amounts of other combustion products created by jet engines.   The other pollutants may be somewhat harmful, but they are

High in the trees on the Fiji islands, ants in the species Philidris  nagasau are doing something extraordinary. They've brought in seeds from  several species of a large, lumpy fruit from a plant