Category: Science

Beats and rhymes are life in the world of hip-hop. A rapper’s ability to seamlessly merge the two is the mark of a master wordsmith. Ranking a rapper’s contributions to hip-hop will forever remain subjective, however [Matt] sought to apply a more quantitative approach to the matter. He created an interactive data set containing all […]
German researchers have a line on 3D printed circuitry, but with a twist. Using silver nanowires and a polymer, they’ve created flexible and transparent circuits. Nanowires in this context are only 20 nanometers long and only a few nanometers thick. The research hopes to print things like LEDs and solar cells. Of course, nothing is […]
A recent French study indicates that the ancient Romans may have figured out how to deal with earthquakes by simply deflecting the energy of the waves using structures that resemble metamaterials. These are materials which can manipulate waves (electromagnetic or otherwise) in ways which are normally deemed impossible, such as guiding light around an object […]
From the heart of Silicon Valley comes a new buzzword. Gallium nitride is the future of power technology. Tech blogs are touting gallium nitride as the silicon of the future, and you are savvy enough to get in on the ground floor. Knowing how important gallium nitride is makes you a smarter, better consumer. You […]
Imagine what it must have been like for the first human to witness an aurora. It took a while for our species to migrate from its equatorial birthplace to latitudes where auroras are common, so it was a fairly recent event geologically speaking. Still, that first time seeing the shimmers and ribbons playing across a […]
We will confess that the authors of the Applied Physics Letters article “Experimental Demonstration of Energy Harvesting from the Sky using the Negative Illumination Effect of a Semiconductor Photodiode” never used the acronym DAD or the phrase “dark absorbing diode.” But we thought it was too good to pass up. The research work uses a […]
If you have had trouble with ordinary calculus, you may not be pleased to hear about “photonic calculus” — a recent idea from [Nader Engheta] of the University of Pennsylvania. The idea is that materials with certain properties could manipulate an electromagnetic wave in a way to solve a specific mathematical equation. [Engheta] proposed this […]
Adversarial attacks are not something new to the world of Deep Networks used for image recognition. However, as the research with Deep Learning grows, more flaws are uncovered. The team at the University of KU Leuven in Belgium have demonstrated how, by simple using a colored photo held near the torso of a man can […]
Often it feels as if soldering is deemed to be more of an art form than something that’s underpinned by the cold, hard reality of physics and chemistry. From organic chemistry with rosin, to the material properties of fragile gold bond wires and silicon dies inside IC packages and the effects of thermal stress on […]
One of the things that makes us human is our ability to communicate. However, a stroke or other medical impairment can take that ability away without warning. Although Stephen Hawking managed to do great things with a computer-aided voice, it took a lot of patience and technology to get there. Composing an e-mail or an […]