This Machine Melts Diamonds For Fun
Pressure that can melt diamond, an electromagnetic pulse that can kill, and enough current to light 100 million light bulbs. Such are the extremes within the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In this image, artificial lightning spread like a wave through Z’s 33-metre-wide interior. Designed to research nuclear fusion, Z…
Hairy Electronic Skin That Lets Robots Feel
A coating of hairy electronic skin could soon help robots feel the slightest breath of air or detect the faint vibrations of a beating heart. Kahp-Yang Suh and colleagues at Seoul National University in South Korea wove together thousands of individual polymer nanohairs to make a flexible touch sensor that is more sensitive than human…
Sprinting as Fast as You Can Will Keep You Drier In the Rain, Says Physics
It’s the age-old question. What’s going to get you less wet, sprinting through the rain or walking normally? There are a lot more factors involved than you might have thought, but physics dictates that running as fast as possible will normally keep you drier, unless there’s a tailwind, or, err, you’re a bit thin. Professor…
15 of the World’s Smartest Men in Their Natural Habitat
Beyond the rock stars like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and multi-billion dollar, cutting-edge facilities like CERN, a lot of physics (especially the theoretical sort) is still done the same way it was at the turn of the last century—by hand, on blackboards. Our friends at Oobject have assembled a gallery of history’s brightest minds leveraging old-school…