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

(…) 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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

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

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

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

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