We’ve known for years that many animals can somehow sense magnetic fields. Birds apparently use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate. Dogs can find a box containing a magnet better than they can find a similar box with a food treat in it. But humans, apparently, can’t visualize magnetic fields without help. Several scientists at […]
Quantum dots certainly sound as if they should be something cool, but carry the hazardous baggage of being sometimes made from cadmium which can be dangerous. What are they? In essence, they are nanometer-scale particles, so small that when high energy light hits them, the photons will be absorbed and re-emitted at a lower energy […]
Researchers at Delft University of Technology have created a detector that enables the detection of a single photon’s worth of radio frequency energy. The chip is only 10 mm square and the team plans to use it to explore the relationship of mass and gravity to quantum theory. The chip has immediate applications in MRI […]
Knowing in what absolute direction your robot is pointed can be crucial, and expensive systems like those used by NASA on Mars are capable of calculating this six-dimensional heading vector to within around one degree RMS, but they are fairly expensive. If you want similar accuracy on a hacker budget, this paper shows you how […]
Even though the majority of the Earth is covered in water, a surprising number of people around the world don’t have easy access to clean drinking water. The oceans of course are full of salt, and it is difficult to filter that salt out. Researchers at the University of Manchester have found a way to […]
Just when you though it was safe to venture out, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released an unexpected update. Magnetic North is on the move — faster than expected. That’s right, we know magnetic north moves around, but now it’s happened at a surprising rate. Instead of waiting for the normal five year interval […]
You’ve probably seen the videos of a grape — cut almost totally in half — in a microwave creates a plasma. A recent physics paper studies the phenomenon with a lot of high-tech gear and now the actual mechanism is known. [Veritasium] interviews the scientists and explains the grape plasma phenomenon in plain language. You […]
Aerogels have changed how a lot of high tech equipment is insulated. Resembling frozen smoke, the gel is lightweight and has extremely low thermal conductivity. However there’s always a downside, traditional aerogel material is brittle. Any attempt to compress it beyond 20% of its original size will change the material. Researchers at UCLA and eight […]
Nuclear fusion, as a method of power generation, continues to elude humanity. It promises cheap, virtually limitless energy, if only we could find a way to achieve it. On the other hand, achieving nuclear fusion of a few atoms just for the fun of it is actually quite doable, even in the home lab. [Jackson […]
We don’t know whether quantum physics proves the universe is truly a strange place or that we are living in a virtual reality simulation, but we know it turns a lot of common sense into garbage. Take noise, for example. Noise — as in random electrical noise — is bad, right? We spend a lot […]