From the Golden Gate Bridge to an ancient Japanese bell, the physical structures around us are humming with secret sound. Artist Bill Fontana has made a career of capturing these haunting and complex soundscapes. As an artist at residence at CERN, he’s mostly recently been listening in on the world’s largest particle collider.
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Falling into a black hole never sounded like fun. How could it? Black holes are the darkest places in the universe, where not even light can escape the singularity’s immense gravitational pull. It wouldn’t be fun. But what, exactly, would happen?
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How do you listen to your music? Headphones you say? Sometimes on an Airplay or Bluetooth speaker? Oh. That’s pretty cool. I just listen to mine on plasma. Dancing electrical sparks that leap between two electrodes and produce a small amount of ozone. No big deal. Just, you know, how cool people do. Actually that’s not how I listen to music, but it could be if I back the ARC Plasma… Read More
Last week, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics published the most exact value ever observed for the weight of a single electron—a value 13 times more accurate than the previous estimate. And the Penning trap, the kooky looking device shown above, was crucial in obtaining this measurement.
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We love stories that take us to alien planets and let us explore whole new environments. But not every alien planet is totally realistic, especially given how much we’ve learned about exoplanets lately. So we asked six experts to tell us the biggest mistakes they see in fictional habitable worlds — and here’s what they told us.
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Whether you’re a huge geek or a total luddite, you’ve got to be excited when scientists invent a new kind of laser, especially one that stands to replace the one we’ve been using for fiber optic communications for the last 40 years. A team of CalTech researchers did just that. Be excited.
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The discovery of the Higgs Boson is perhaps science’s biggest recent success
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Remember how Christopher Reeve’s Superman spun the earth backward to go back in time and save Lois? Turns out, he probably shouldn’t have done that, because slowing the earth’s rotation to a stop would seriously mess up everything on our planet, as Earth Unplugged explains. Not cool, Superman.
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You know those genius, almost sentient quadcopters that can learn new skills like juggle balls, fly in tandem, work together, go through hoops, attach themselves to wall and basically do things that will eventually destroy mankind? This guy, Kai Hou, is like the human equivalent of those. He’s an acrobatic master that can flip, spin, jump, turn, tumble through the air and do basically anything that shreds our typical sense of gravity. I wish I could jump like him.
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You’re looking a ribbon of graphene that’s just one atom thick and fifteen atoms wide—and it could help shift data thousands of times faster than anything else currently can.
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