Physics & Chemistry

You Can Make Diamonds Out of Peanut Butter

Diamond’s are beautiful but, sadly, rather expensive. Now, though, Dan Frost of the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Germany has discovered that you can make them from peanut butter. No, really. BBC Future reports that Frost has been working hard to replicate the complex crystalline structures that can be found in the lower mantle of the Earth.…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

A Radically New Particle Accelerator Could Have 500 Times the Power

If you know anything about the Large Hadron Collider, you know that it is huge. Massive. 17 miles of tunnels under Switzerland. Traditional accelerators need all that space to get particles to smash into each other at close to the speed of light. But scientists at Stanford have come one step closer to a new…

Physics & Chemistry Sarah Zhang

Can You Help CERN Identify What’s Happening in These Archive Images?

As an institute full of scientists, you might think CERN was good at keeping records. But it’s happened upon a stash of archived images that seem to make no sense whatsoever—and it wants you to help it work out what they show. The European scientists recently set about digitizing reams of images—roughly 120,000—taken between 1955…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

How Long a Yellow Light Should Be

Sitting at a red light can feel torturously long, but yellow lights often seem suspiciously short. It’s not all in your head: some yellow lights are too short. There is an ideal minimum length of a yellow traffic light. You just might never experience it (especially if you’re from Chicago). There’s no universal correct yellow…

Physics & Chemistry Kate Knibbs

This Is What Happens in Slow-Mo When You Shoot Liquid Drops With Lasers

Lasers? Fun. Slow motion? Beautiful. Shooting things with lasers and recording what happens in slow motion? That’ll be what happens in this beautiful video. The headline may sound like it over-promsies but actually it… doesn’t, really. This video shows how shooting small droplets of liquid with incredibly short laser pulses can create all kinds of…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

Scientists Are Creating the Coldest Cubic Meter in the Universe

It’s hard to describe exactly how cold the coldest cubic meter in the universe will be. Frozen to just a blip above absolute zero—the temperature at which atoms cannot even vibrate—the CUORE experiment will try to nail down a tiny number that has long eluded physicists: the mass of a neutrino. The CUORE detector, or…

Physics & Chemistry Sarah Zhang

How to Measure Distance in Space

Space is expansive: looking up to the stars, it can sometimes feel like everything sits on a single, two-dimensional sheet held up above us. It doesn’t, of course—so how do we measure how far away things are? In this vide, Yuan-Sen Ting explains how everything from trigonometric parallaxes to, um, standard candles can help us…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

Blue LEDs Are A Complicated Problem Worthy of the Nobel Prize

The 2014 Nobel Prize for physics went to the inventors of the blue LED. Read on for context on why that’s a prize-worthy discovery, and check out this technical article in Physics Today if you want to dive deeper into the physics.

Physics & Chemistry Mika McKinnon

Inventors of the Blue LED Inside Nearly Every Device You Own Win Nobel

There’s pretty good chance you have a piece of this year’s physics Nobel prize-winning invention in your pocket. The blue light-emitting diode (LED) is found in the screens of millions of phones as well as our bright, new energy-efficient LED lightbulbs. Today, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded tothe three scientistswho made this revolutionary…

Physics & Chemistry Sarah Zhang

This Particle Is Matter and Antimatter at the Same Time

You might think that matter and antimatter aren’t the best of friends, cancelling each other out when they come into contact—but you’d be wrong. In fact, researchers have now discovered a particle that’s made up of both. Researchers, led by Ali Yazdani of Princeton University, have now imaged what they call a Majorana particle. They…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

Scientists Make the World’s Smallest “Microphone” From a Single Molecule

With a name like “microphone,” you’d expect something small—but perhaps not quite as small as this. Scientist have figured out how to use just one molecule to detect the vibrations from sound. Although we talk about “hearing” rather than “feeling” sound, sound is made up of the physical vibrations through some medium, usually air but…

Physics & Chemistry Sarah Zhang

Physicists Are Backing Away From the Biggest Discovery of This Century

Back in March, a group of physicists announced the first direct evidence of the Big Bang in a splashy press conference followed by Nobel prize forecasts and champagne. But scientists have since questioned the discovery, and a new paper suggests the signal detected was not evidence of the Big Bang but instead largely, if not…

Physics & Chemistry Sarah Zhang

Here’s Everything We Know About The Chelyabinsk Meteor

When a 4.5 billion year old relic from the dawn of the solar system hurtled through the skies above the Russia in 2013, we all heard about it. Now after over a year of poking through bushes for lost fragments and analyzing data, we’ve got a good idea of what happened. Top image: Meteor over…

Physics & Chemistry Mika McKinnon

Scientists Have Recorded the Sound of a Single Atom

What’s the sound of one atom moving? That might sound a bit like a silly philosophical question, but actually it’s a scientific puzzle that’s now been solved. If you’re wondering why the headline isn’t a more click bait-like “Listen to the Sound a Single Atom Makes,” it’s because you won’t be able to hear it.…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

Physicists Are Making Solid Light

A team of researchers from Princeton University has started doing some very strange things with light. Instead of letting it zip by at incredibly high speed, they’re stopping it dead: freezing it into crystal. Crucially, they’re not shining light through crystal; rather, they making light into crystal. It’s a process that involves fixing the particles…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

Read Richard Feynman’s Best-Known Lectures For Free

In 1964, Richard Feynman gave a series of seven, hour-long lectures at Cornell University that have gone down in history as a wonderfully accessible introduction to physics. Now, you can read them online for free. In fact, the series of lectures spawned what became the best-selling series of physics books ever, which shifted over 1.5…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

TNT-Coated Carbon Nanotubes Could Generate Future Electricity

Light the touchpaper and stand well back, because we’re about to… make sustainable electricity? That’s the idea according to a researcher from MIT, whose vision for future power generation involves a healthy dose of TNT. It’s about four years since Michael Strano first created a yarn from carbon nanotubes and coated it in TNT. When…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

Schrödinger’s Cat, Caught on Camera

While quantum mechanics is tough to get your head round, you probably know about Schrödinger’s poor old cat: left in a box, both alive and dead at the same time. Well, now there’s a picture of the ill-fated feline. https://gizmodo.com/how-the-hell-does-quantum-mechanics-work-anyway-1625454355 Well, kind of. What you’re actually looking at is an image created by quantum weirdness.…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

How To Perfectly Locate Your Router, Using Physics

How do you determine the optimal placement for a wifi router? For most people, this could be an exercise in design, or in outlet location and cable length, or maybe where it’s most convenient to frequently reset. For a physicist, it involves solving the Helmholtz equation. Jason Cole is a PhD physics student in London.…

Physics & Chemistry Mika McKinnon

Physicists Want To Know If We’re All Actually Living in a Hologram

Although it sounds entirely like something dreamed up in a smoke-filled dorm room, whether the entire universe is hologram is a very serious question—a question that gets at the heart of a fundamental problem in physics. A new experiment starting up at Fermilab just might hold the answer. Fermilab, a government-funded research campus on the…

Physics & Chemistry Sarah Zhang

You Can Make Diamonds Out of Peanut Butter

A Radically New Particle Accelerator Could Have 500 Times the Power

Can You Help CERN Identify What’s Happening in These Archive Images?

How Long a Yellow Light Should Be

This Is What Happens in Slow-Mo When You Shoot Liquid Drops With Lasers

Scientists Are Creating the Coldest Cubic Meter in the Universe

How to Measure Distance in Space

Blue LEDs Are A Complicated Problem Worthy of the Nobel Prize

Inventors of the Blue LED Inside Nearly Every Device You Own Win Nobel

This Particle Is Matter and Antimatter at the Same Time

Scientists Make the World’s Smallest “Microphone” From a Single Molecule

Physicists Are Backing Away From the Biggest Discovery of This Century

Here’s Everything We Know About The Chelyabinsk Meteor

Scientists Have Recorded the Sound of a Single Atom

Physicists Are Making Solid Light

Read Richard Feynman’s Best-Known Lectures For Free

TNT-Coated Carbon Nanotubes Could Generate Future Electricity

Schrödinger’s Cat, Caught on Camera

How To Perfectly Locate Your Router, Using Physics

Physicists Want To Know If We’re All Actually Living in a Hologram

US Airlines Are Hiking Bag Fees Amid Iran War Oil Crisis

This Ridiculously Simple Trick Might Stop Gulls From Nabbing Your Lunch

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