In particular, Antypas’ team uses their experiment to search for a class of dark matter known as ultralight dark matter. At its heaviest, an ultralight dark matter particle is still about a trillion times lighter than an electron. According to quantum mechanics, all matter has particle-like and wave-like qualities, with larger objects typically harboring more […]
Read MoreThe goal here is to trace out triangles on top of these lines such that the triangles satisfy two requirements: First, no two triangles share an edge. (Systems that fulfill this requirement are called Steiner triple systems.) And second, ensure that every small subset of triangles utilizes a sufficiently large number of nodes. The way […]
Read MoreLet’s say you want to know what it’s like to walk on the moon. Is there any way to simulate a moon walk while staying on Earth? Well, yes. In fact, there are several. But before we get to them, why would walking on the moon be different than on Earth? It’s all about gravity. […]
Read MoreEveryone has the same comment about Batman: He’s cool because he’s just a normal dude, but he’s also a superhero. It’s true, he doesn’t have superpowers. However, what he does have is a combination of skills and equipment. In the movie The Batman, we get to see him use one of his “toys”—his ascender gun. […]
Read MoreIn late February, just weeks after Maryna Viazovska learned she had won a Fields Medal—the highest honor for a mathematician—Russian tanks and war planes began their assault on Ukraine, her homeland, and Kyiv, her hometown. Viazovska no longer lived in Ukraine, but her family was still there. Her two sisters, a 9-year-old niece, and an […]
Read MoreLast month, physicists at Toronto-based startup Xanadu published a curious experiment in Nature in which they generated seemingly random numbers. During the pandemic, they built a tabletop machine named Borealis, consisting of lasers, mirrors, and over a kilometer of optical fiber. Within Borealis, 216 beams of infrared light bounced around through a complicated network of […]
Read MoreFinally, we have the crane itself. I left off some of the unimportant forces here—the most critical are the forces from the magnet and the cart pulling in opposite directions. All of these objects have a net force of zero. That’s the important part: With a zero net force, there will be a zero acceleration. […]
Read MoreSound waves can also steer objects inside organisms. Daniel Ahmed, an engineer at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, recently used ultrasound to move hollow plastic beads inside a live zebrafish embryo. By doing these experiments, Ahmed aims to demonstrate the potential of using sound to guide drugs to a target site within an animal, such as […]
Read Moreas the atoms of arithmetic, prime numbers have always occupied a special place on the number line. Now, Jared Duker Lichtman, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Oxford, has resolved a well-known conjecture, establishing another facet of what makes the primes special—and, in some sense, even optimal. “It gives you a larger context […]
Read MoreThat might seem like a large volume, but it’s not. It’s almost half of a liter, so that’s half a bottle of soda. Moles and Particles These moles aren’t the furry creatures that make holes in the ground. The name comes from molecules (which is apparently too long to write). Here’s an example to help […]
Read MoreIceCube is an example of how big science, and particularly particle physics, now often works on generational time scales. Getting from the idea of IceCube to actually drilling its neutrino sensors into a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice to pinpointing a high-energy neutrino source took 30 years. In that time, key personnel retired, passed away, […]
Read MoreShe decided to study physics. It was, in a way, good timing—a Black American woman had just become the first of her kind to earn a physics PhD, back in Greene-Johnson’s home state. At Stanford, Greene-Johnson was the only Black student in her major, but that didn’t surprise her. What did was the presence of […]
Read More“[Floer] homology theory depends only on the topology of your manifold. [This] is Floer’s incredible insight,” said Agustin Moreno of the Institute for Advanced Study. Dividing by Zero Floer theory ended up being wildly useful in many areas of geometry and topology, including mirror symmetry and the study of knots. “It’s the central tool in […]
Read MoreSince the velocity is defined as the time-rate of change of position, the slope of this plot should give the velocity. That puts this wave speed at 2.85 m/s, which is pretty close to the theoretical prediction. I’m happy with that. But what if I want to look at the speed of a wave in […]
Read MoreAfter their 2015 success, the researchers set out to use their flattening technique to address all finite polyhedra. This change made the problem far more complex. This is because with non-orthogonal polyhedra, faces might have the shape of triangles or trapezoids—and the same creasing strategy that works for a refrigerator box won’t work for a […]
Read MoreSuppose this parallel plate capacitor is connected to a 9-volt battery. A volt is a measure of the electric potential difference. In short, this is the electric potential energy per charge—it’s a measure of how much energy a charge would gain by moving across that potential. So, this 9-volt battery will create a 9-volt change […]
Read MoreRemember we’re dealing with the photon’s wave function here. Since the bounce doesn’t constitute a measurement, the wave function doesn’t collapse. Instead, it splits in two: Most of the wave function remains in the box, but the small, rapidly oscillating piece near where the mirror was inserted leaves the box and heads toward the detector. […]
Read MoreOur planet also changes positions. In six months, the Earth will go from one side of the sun to the other. This is a change in distance of almost 300 million kilometers, and it’s enough to cause a noticeable apparent position change for some of the nearest stars. In fact, parallax is an important tool […]
Read MoreSeismic waves from a big quake are easy to see—think of the classic image of a seismograph, pencil scratching out telltale waves on a rotating paper as the tremor arrives. Even to highly trained eyes, PEGS are just squiggles, indistinguishable from the noise. It’s hard to prove they’re there. In 2017, early identifications of PEGS […]
Read MoreIt’s May 4, so happy Star Wars Day—may the fourth be with you! One of the iconic scenes from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi is the battle on Tatooine at the Sarlacc Pit, the home of a massive creature that just waits to eat the things that fall into its sand hole. (No spoiler […]
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