Tag Archives: Physics

The egg drop challenge is an annual rite of passage for many students learning about physics: Swaddle an egg in cotton balls and masking tape or other materials, and then drop it off the roof of your school. Anyone who has participated in this exercise knows how difficult it is to engineer a structure that will save the egg from …

More than a billion cups of coffee are consumed daily: French-press, espresso, cold brew, whatever it takes. Arnold Mathijssen, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, is partial to pour-over coffee, which involves manually pouring hot water over ground beans and filtering it into a pot or mug below. Surely, he figured, applying the principles of fluid dynamics to the …

On Thursday, researchers unveiled the most precise measurement yet of a neutrino, scaling down the maximum possible mass of the ghostly specks of matter that permeate our universe. The result, published in the journal Science, does not define the exact mass of a neutrino, just its upper limit. But the finding helps bring physicists closer to figuring out just what …

Thomas Vilgis, a food physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany, has been in love with foie gras for a quarter century. The luxurious delicacy is a pâté or mousse made from the rich, fattened livers of ducks or geese. “It’s something really extraordinary,” Dr. Vilgis said, recalling his early encounters with high-quality foie gras when …

An international team of astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the most compelling evidence to date that dark energy — a mysterious phenomenon pushing our universe to expand ever faster — is not a constant force of nature but one that ebbs and flows through cosmic time. Dark energy, the new measurement suggests, may not resign our universe to a fate of …

Two NASA missions are ready for a late-night launch aboard a single rocket. Both aim to unravel mysteries about the universe — one by peering far from Earth, the other by looking closer to home. The rocket’s chief passenger is SPHEREx, a space telescope that will take images of the entire sky in more than a hundred colors that are …

Anyone who has sat through a third-grade science class knows there are three primary states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. Microsoft now says it has created a new state of matter in its quest to make a powerful machine, called a quantum computer, that could accelerate the development of everything from batteries to medicines to artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, …

Deep in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, physicists have uncovered evidence of a ghostly subatomic particle catapulting through space at a speed they once could only dream of. “What we have discovered is, we think, the most energetic neutrino ever recorded on Earth,” said Paul de Jong, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam and current spokesperson for the …

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, or NASEM, is an independent, 162-year-old nongovernmental agency tasked with investigating and reporting on a wide range of subjects. In recent years, diversity, equity and inclusion — collectively known as D.E.I. — have been central to its agenda. But the Academies’ priorities changed abruptly on Jan. 31. Shortly after receiving a “stop …

Every July, at the opening ceremony of the San Fermín festival signaling the imminent start of the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, more than 5,000 people cram into the city’s central plaza. The crowd starts the morning dressed in white. By noon, much of their clothing has been dyed pink by the free-flowing sangria. Participants in the event …