The second has served us well for hundreds of years, but it’s not perfect – the atomic clocks that are our official timekeepers lose a second of time every 200 million years or so. That may not be enough to make you late for choir practice, but in the fields of space travel and…
Physics
One of the world’s most respected theoretical physicists Michio Kaku has predicted that humans will make contact with an alien civilisation within this century. While he doesn’t know if we’ll be able to talk back to them by then, Kaku thinks that humans will detect aliens before 2100 by listening in to their radio communications.…
An international team of scientists have provided the first proof of an exotic new state of matter, known as Rydberg polarons. This state of matter is formed at ultra cold temperatures, when an electron orbits its nucleus at such a great distance that other atoms end up bound inside the orbit. All these atoms form…
Temperature changes large and small are happening around us all the time, and scientists have come up with a machine that can convert those fluctuations into electricity, potentially powering sensors and communication devices almost out of thin air. The energy harvesting is done through what’s called a thermal resonator: a device that captures heat…
Curling is one of the more unusual sports of the Winter Olympics, often drawing comparisons to shuffleboard, but played on ice. A roughly 42-pound curling rock, or stone, is pushed then slides down a sheet of ice, while two players furiously sweep the surface in front of the stone. The sweeping motion heats up the…
Physicists have confirmed the existence of a new form of atomic nuclei, and the fact that it’s not symmetrical challenges the fundamental theories of physics that explain our Universe. But that’s not as bad as it sounds, because the 2016 discovery could help scientists solve one of the biggest mysteries in theoretical physics –…
Five years ago, physicists from Harvard and MIT achieved a world first by forcing a pair of photons to interact with one another in ways that shouldn’t seem possible. What do you do when you’ve achieved such a lofty goal? You try to add a third photon, of course. With all eyes on light…
Five years ago, physicists from Harvard and MIT achieved a world first by forcing a pair of photons to interact with one another in ways that shouldn’t seem possible. What do you do when you’ve achieved such a lofty goal? You try to add a third photon, of course. With all eyes on light…
Oganesson (Og) is the heaviest chemical element in the periodic table, but its properties have proved difficult to measure since it was first synthesised in 2002. Now an advanced computer simulation has filled in some of the gaps, and it turns out the element is even weirder than many expected. At the atomic level,…