It’s simultaneously comforting and terrifying to imagine that everything that ever could happen does happen. You didn’t make that horribly tasteless joke that got you fired and somehow the new Daft Punk single sucks! This isn’t just a thought experiment; it’s a very real possibility teased by every quantum physics experiment ever. More »
The world’s hottest new supermaterial isn’t as fancy as you might think; in fact, it’s produced by feeding wood pulp to algae. The result, nanocellulose, is amazingly light, super-strong, and conducts electricity. That versatility lends it to plenty of fantastic possible applications. Here are some of the most exciting. More »
Imagine if silicon chips were smaller than a grain of sand and could be made using a laser printer: everything under the sun could be made unobtrusively smart. But that’s not science fiction, and you don’t have to imagine too hard—because researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center have already done it. More »
3D scanning at a range of 0.62 miles? It just became possible, thanks to a laser camera developed by physicists at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. You can pretty much see how it works from the images above — laser beams are bounced off the target and the duration of their return journey is measured precisely enough to detect millimeter depth changes even at extreme distances. Speaking of which, the researchers believe they could pump the range up to 10 miles with a bit of extra research, and even shrink the blaster down to make it “fully portable” in less than five years. Who knows, someday it might even work around corners. But there’s a problem: skin doesn’t reflect the beams properly, which means people can’t be accurately scanned unless they also happen to be ringwraiths. As a result, the researchers seem slightly at loss as to what to do with the technology, with their best suggestions so far being watching the growth of foliage or tracking the movement of rocks. We’d try to think up some other ideas, were it not for the distracting and utterly irrelevant Nazgul v Wilhelm video embedded after the break.
Source: Heriot Watt
Finding the Higgs Boson particle is a revolutionary scientific discovery, sure, but CERN isn’t the only scientific body rewriting our understanding of elementary physics. An international team of researchers have just announced that the massive cosmic ray detector protruding from the ISS may have at long last detected dark matter. More »
Science fans around the world were saddened when CERN announced its Large Hadron Collider would be shutting down for almost two years worth of repairs and upgrades. But as this video explains: that’s ok. Because when the LHC is powered up again in 2015, it will finally be able to run at full capacity. More »
A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, has created the first ever pair of graphene-based earphones. It might not surprise you to find out that they’re utterly incredible. More »
Last July, scientists announced that they’d discovered what they strongly believed to be the Higgs Boson—but quirks in the data suggested that might not be the case. Now, though, CERN has announced that the observed particle is “looking more and more like a Higgs boson.” More »
Our favorite mind warping illusionist Brusspup has a slick new trick to wrap your raisin brain around: water flows normally and then BOOM it warps and twists and bends like you never imagined water could when sound hits it. How does this happen? More »
Taking advantage of its medium of choice, Minute Physics makes the incredibly vast scale of the observable universe a little easier to comprehend by comparing it to the 2,073,600 pixels in this 1080P video. But be forewarned: drawing similarities between the earth and a single pixel in this clip isn’t going to help if you’re already suffering from feelings of insignificance. More »
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