Nov 21
Li-on batteries are great and all, but there’s a barrier preventing them from storing much more power: they, um, tend to catch fire
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Nov 20
Why do nuclear bombs make mushroom clouds? The phenomenon all comes down to a little something called the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, and by extension, convection. I’ll begin with the somewhat longer, but less geeky explanation before descending once again into extreme nerdery.
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Nov 13
Professor Stephen Hawking is not impressed by the discovery of the Higgs boson particle earlier this year. First, it lost him a $100 bet. Second, he would’ve been happier if a more “interesting” solution to the problem of the mass of the universe had been discovered.
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Nov 02
This machine by Arthur Ganson just blew my mind: its engine runs at 200 revolutions per minute but the last gear of its 12-gear mechanism is locked to a block of concrete. It looks still but, in reality, it is moving. You just can’t see it because it completes one revolution every two trillion years. How the hell is this possible?
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Nov 01
If idea of fiddling around with a tiny, wrist-mounted touchscreen is enough to make you want to give up on smartwatches before they even really arrive, then whoa. This 3D gesture-recognition might actually make these things useful.
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Nov 01
We’re used to thinking of the moon as a cold and unassuming lump of rock—but new research suggests that it could have been made of a strange magma mush for hundreds of millions of years before it solidified into the object we now see every night.
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Oct 31
For centuries, scientists have puzzled over a counter-intutive observation: hot water, for some reason, seems to freeze faster than cold. Fortunately, now a team of physicists has worked out why it happens.
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Oct 30
Every so often, the thing you’ve been looking for all along is right under your nose. Like the latest material to offer itself up as the future of quantum computing—which has been sitting on banknotes for decades.
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Oct 28
A team of scientists has created a material that’s enough to confuse fellow researchers and the Predator alike: a substance which looks cold when viewed using infrared light even when it’s getting hotter.
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Oct 28
Betrand Russell once wrote that "[m]athematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music." In this video, Yann Pineill and Nicolas Lefaucheux prove him right.
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