Physics

Slug Slime Is A Liquid Crystal And It’s Actually Pretty Incredible

You do not become a forest-floor-creeping mollusk on good looks alone; to crawl effectively, you need something with which to lubricate your wriggling, slimy, slithering self. Mucus, secreted in abundance from your entire body, is just the ticket. But slug slime is good for a lot more than whole-body lubrication. In this installment of Deep…

Can You Guess The Subject Of This Photo?

Your instinct might be to guess something microscopic in size – but the subject of this photograph is actually quite large. All photos featured by kind permission of Alan Friedman The answer? You’re looking at a photo of the Sun – a closeup of active region 2177, to be exact, captured in October 2014. “The…

Grand Central Station Is Radioactive

Behold, the miserable relic of a toxic era! Its denizens scurry through it, unaware or unable to avoid the poison it gives off. Seriously, though, Grand Central Station gives you a dose of radiation when you go through it, thanks to the granite used to build it. Radiation is a part of the natural world,…

First Ever Image to Show Light as a Wave and Particle at the Same Time

What you’re looking at here is a major breakthrough. The image reveals a property of light that has never been witnessed before by human eyes, though we’ve long known about it. But at last, thanks in an ingenious imaging experiment, we can now see how light behaves as a wave and a particle at the…

How Scientists Have Made Bullets Out Of Light

Light bullets are not the deadly things their names make them out to be. They are, however, decidedly weird. To make a light bullet, researchers have to make a pulse of laser light that is continuously re-focusing itself. The Solitary Wave When you turn on a flashlight, or even a laser beam, and shine it…

How Radiation Nearly Broke Physics

It was the heady days of the early 1900s, and radiation was all the rage. Researchers had just found a kind of radiation called “beta decay,” and they discovered that it did something that seemed to smash one of the basic tenets of physics. Here’s how the lowly neutrino saved the entire field. At the…

The Photography at CERN Is Helping Solve the Mysteries of the Universe

Everyone’s favorite mega-machine, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, is meant to help humans some of the most basic questions about the nature of our world. How it goes about this is—in a word—complex. But part of it involves a bit of good old-fashioned (kind of) photography. This documentary put out by the Carnegie Museum…

Here’s How A Mob Of Sheep Could One Day Save Your Life

When a crowd needs to pass through a small doorway – an emergency exit, for example – the opening can quickly become obstructed. Recently, researchers have been using sheep to understand how they might mitigate this potentially catastrophic bottleneck effect. The above video was shot by Iker Zuriguel and his colleagues at the University of…

The Story Behind Earth’s “Other” Moon And Its Completely Whacked Orbit

We all know and love the moon. We’re so assured that we only have one that we don’t even give it a specific name. It’s just The Moon. But the moon is not the Earth’s only natural satellite. Here’s what you need to know about 3753 Cruithne and what its weird orbit reveals about the…

Could There Be Another Planet Behind The Sun?

Universe Today’s Fraser Cain nails it in just five words: “No. Nooooo. No. Just no.” But then he explains how we know this, and what would happen if a planet were to suddenly materialize, in an orbital position hidden from our view by the Sun. Eventually, our orbits would intersect, and there’d be an encounter.…

How We Can Use Light to See Inside the Human Body

Human flesh is opaque. As any good dictionary will tell you, that means it has the quality of “not transmitting light; being impenetrable to sight.” Well, forget that: scientists now can use light to see inside objects that were traditionally off-limits to the human eye—including our bodies. Of course it’s already possible to use X-rays,…

How To Hack Your Street Lamps Like An Astronaut

A bright street lamp can ruin a night of stargazing, saturating your retinas with light and washing out the comparatively faint glow of constellations and meteors. Here’s a handy hack you can use the next time you need to put one temporarily (and reversibly) out of business, courtesy of NASA astronaut Don Pettit. Pettit shows…

How Nanoscale Optics Create Nature’s Most Dazzling Colors

What do a butterfly’s shimmering wings, a fish’s opalescent scales, and a peacock’s brilliant feathers have in common? Yes, their colors are beautifully iridescent. But they are also produced by the physical interaction of light with sophisticated nanoscale architecture that we are only just beginning to understand. Image: Wikimedia Most creatures get their color from…

Melting Glaciers Lead to the Freak Phenomenon Of “Dead Water”

Climate change is bad. Melting glaciers are also bad. However, both these things lead to something called “dead water.” From a nautical perspective, this is also bad because it stops a ship in the middle of the ocean. But it is so, so cool to look at. As glaciers melt, they release massive amounts of…

The Story of the First Photo on the Web

CERN, the world’s most awe-inspiring physics research facility, is pimping some images of its newly renovated Large Hadron Collider today. It reminds me of the very first time CERN pimped some images on the web nearly a quarter century ago. Let’s just say they were not entirely scientific in nature. That’s the photo above—or at…

Watch This Water Droplet Pulse And Form A “Star”

You’ll have heard of this effect in high school, but you probably haven’t seen this manifestation of it. It makes an ordinary water droplet pulse like it has a heartbeat. And sometimes, it makes the drop form into a pulsing star. If you were to know that the water droplet in the clip above is…

What Will the Future of Molecular Manufacturing Really Be Like?

Molecular machines are nano-scale assemblers that construct themselves and their surroundings into ever more complex structures. Sometimes dubbed “nanotech” in the media, these devices are promising — but also widely misunderstood. Here’s what separates the science fact from science fiction. The concepts that underpin this form of nanotechnology have certainly had long enough to percolate…

The Original Black Hole For Interstellar Was Too Confusing

One of the many reasons why Interstellarwas such a wonderful movie was that it used genuine scientific equations to show what happens in the vicinity of a black hole. But, just like the actors in front of the camera, it seems the black hole also got a little make up to make it more presentable…

Physics Valentines (And Anti-Valentines), For Those You Love (And Hate)

The staff of symmetry has created a fun set of physics-themed Valentines to share with the people you love. And because ours is a universe that contains both matter and antimatter, they’ve created a complementary set of anti-Valentines, for the people you love to hate. My favorite Valentine/anti-Valentine pair appears above. The cards are designed…

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? According to Jinzi Huang, co-author of a recently published study that examines how “hard candy bodies dissolve in laminar high-speed water flows,” approximately 2,500.