There are five general senses: touch for feels, taste for food, smell for avoiding trash, hearing for sounds, and, of course, eyesight for visualizing the very waves making up that sound. [PlasmatronX] drives that last point home with his camera for sound waves, that’s even able to capture constructive and destructive interference. (Video, embedded below.) […]
Physics simulations using classical mechanics is something that’s fairly easily done on regular consumer hardware, with real-time approximations a common feature in video games. Moving things to the quantum realm gets more complex, though with equilibrium many-body systems still quite solvable. Where things get interesting is with nonequilibrium quantum systems. These open systems are subject […]
Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of mathematics is that it applies to literally everything, even things that do not exist in this Universe. In addition to this there are a number of alternative ways to represent reality, with Fourier space and its related transforms being one of the most well-known examples. An alternative to Euclidian […]
If you read about Hall effect sensors — the usual way to detect and measure magnetic fields these days — it sounds deceptively simple. There’s a metal plate with current flowing across it in one direction, and sensors at right angles to the current flow. Can it really be that simple? According to a recent […]
For how crucial whales have been for humanity, from their harvest for meat and oil to their future use of saving the world from a space probe, humans knew very little about them until surprisingly recently. Most people, even in Herman Melville’s time, considered whales to be fish, and it wasn’t until humans went looking […]
A lot of claims have been made about the purported benefits of adding chopped carbon fiber to FDM filaments, but how many of these claims are actually true? In the case of PLA at least, the [I built a thing] channel on YouTube makes a convincing case that for PLA filament, the presence of chopped […]
One major reason for the high cost of developing new drugs and other chemicals is the sheer number of experiments involved; designing a single new drug can require synthesizing and testing hundreds or thousands of chemicals, and a promising compound will go through many stages of testing. At this scale, simply performing sequential experiments is […]
Want to visualize radioactive particles? You don’t need a boatload of lab equipment. Just a cloud chamber. And [Curious Scientist] is showing off an improved miniature cloud chamber that is easy to replicate using a 3D printer and common components. The build uses a Peltier module, a CPU cooler, an aluminum plate, thermal paste, and headlight […]
Once upon a time, transmutation of the elements was a really big deal. Alchemists drove their patrons near to bankruptcy chasing the philosopher’s stone to no avail, but at least we got chemistry out of it. Nowadays, anyone with a neutron source can do some spicy transmutation. Or, if you happen to have a twelve […]
Over on ScienceDaily we learn that an international team of scientists have turned a common semiconductor germanium into a superconductor. Researchers have been able to make the semiconductor germanium superconductive for the first time by incorporating gallium into its crystal lattice through the process of molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE). MBE is the same process which is […]