Black holes born with magnetic fields quickly shed them
Like a shaggy dog in springtime, some black holes have to shed. New computer simulations reveal how black holes might discard their magnetic fields. Unlike…
Category: Physics
With Steven Weinberg’s death, physics loses a titan
Mythology has its titans. So do the movies. And so does physics. Just one fewer now. Steven Weinberg died July 23, at the age of…
These weird, thin ice crystals are springy and bendy
Try to bend an icicle and it’ll snap in two. With its tendency to crack into shards, ice’s reputation for being stiff and brittle seems…
A study of Earth’s crust hints that supernovas aren’t gold mines
A smattering of plutonium atoms embedded in Earth’s crust are helping to resolve the origins of nature’s heaviest elements. Scientists had long suspected that elements…
Morphing noodles start flat but bend into curly pasta shapes as they’re cooked
This pasta is no limp noodle. When imprinted with carefully designed arrangements of grooves, flat pasta morphs as it cooks, forming tubes, spirals and other…
A newfound quasicrystal formed in the first atomic bomb test
In an instant, the bomb obliterated everything. The tower it sat on and the copper wires strung around it: vaporized. The desert sand below: melted.…
Record-breaking light has more than a quadrillion electron volts of energy
The cosmos keeps outdoing itself. Extremely energetic light from space is an unexplained wonder of astrophysics, and now scientists have spotted this light, called gamma…
In a first, neutrinos were caught interacting at the Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider’s claim to fame is its ability to unveil elusive subatomic particles. But there’s one class of particle that it had never…
Laser experiments suggest helium rain falls on Jupiter
Sprinkles of helium rain may fall on Jupiter. At pressures and temperatures present within the gas giant, the hydrogen and helium that make up the…
Nuclear clocks could outdo atomic clocks as the most precise timepieces
Nuclear clocks could be the GOAT: Greatest of all timepieces. If physicists can build them, nuclear clocks would be a brand-new type of clock, one…
Physicists dream big with an idea for a particle collider on the moon
If you could peer into a particle physicist’s daydream, you might spy a vision of a giant lunar particle accelerator. Now, researchers have calculated what…
Mathematician J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. was a Manhattan Project standout despite racism
The Manhattan Project brought together the finest scientific minds in the United States for one urgent purpose: to build an atomic bomb. That included people…
Physicists used LIGO’s mirrors to approach a quantum limit
Quantum mechanics usually applies to very small objects: atoms, electrons and the like. But physicists have now brought the equivalent of a 10-kilogram object to…
A proposed ‘quantum compass’ for songbirds just got more plausible
Scientists could be a step closer to understanding how some birds might exploit quantum physics to navigate. Researchers suspect that some songbirds use a “quantum…