It’s a well-known fact that anti-ferromagnetic materials are called that way because they cannot be magnetized, not even in the presence of a very strong external magnetic field. The randomized spin state is also linked with any vibrations (phonons) of the material, ensuring that there’s a very strong resistance to perturbations. Even so, it might […]
Every engineer is going to have a bad day, but only an unlucky few will have a day so bad that it registers on a seismometer. We’ve always had a morbid fascination with engineering mega-failures, few of which escape our attention. But we’d never heard of the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector implosion until stumbling upon [Alexander […]
Imagine a clock where the colors aren’t from LEDs but a physics phenomenon – polarization. That’s just what [Mosivers], a physicist and electronics enthusiast, has done with the Polarizer Clock. It’s not a perfect build, but the concept is intriguing: using polarized light and stress-induced birefringence to generate colors without resorting to RGB LEDs. The […]
Forty years ago, on the night of Sunday 2 December of 1984, people in the city of Bhopal and surrounding communities were settling in for what seemed like yet another regular night. The worst thing in their near future appeared to be having to go back to school and work the next day. Tragically, many […]
Transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a class of material that’s been receiving significant attention as a possible successor of silicon. Recently, a team of researchers has demonstrated the use of TMDs as an alternative to through-silicon-vias (TSV), which is the current way that multiple layers of silicon semiconductor circuitry are stacked, as seen with, e.g., NAND […]
We are deeply intuitively familiar with our everyday physical world, so it was perhaps a bit of a surprise when researchers discovered a blind spot in our intuitive physical reasoning: it seems humans are oddly terrible at judging knot strength. One example is the reef knot (top) vs. the grief knot (bottom). One is considerably […]
Germanium. It might sound like just another periodic table entry (number 32, to be exact), but in the world of infrared light, it’s anything but ordinary. A recent video by [The Action Lab] dives into the fascinating property of germanium being transparent to infrared light. This might sound like sci-fi jargon, but it’s a real […]
Within our comfortable world of causality we expect that reactions always follow an action and not vice versa. This why the recent chatter in the media about researchers having discovered ‘negative time’ with photons being emitted before the sample being hit by source photons created such a stir. Did these researchers truly just crack our […]
Family Solanum (nightshade) is generally associated with toxins, and for good reasons, as most of the plants in this family are poisonous. This includes some of everyone’s favorite staple vegetables: potatoes, tomatoes and eggplant, with especially potatoes responsible for many poisonings each year. In the case of harvested potatoes, the chemical responsible (steroidal glycoalkaloids, or […]