Antihydrogen forms an ideal study subject for deciphering the secrets of fundamental physics due to it being the most simple anti-matter atom. However, keeping it from casually annihilating itself along with some matter hasn’t gotten much easier since it was first produced in 1995. Recently ALPHA researchers at CERN’s Antimatter Factory announced that they managed […]
We were as excited as anyone when MARSIS (the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) experiment announced there was possibly liquid water under the southern polar ice cap. If there is liquid water on Mars, it would make future exploration and colonization much more feasible. Unfortunately, SHARAD (the Shallow Radar) has a new […]
The cool part about science is that you can ask questions like what happens if you stick some moss spores on the outside of the International Space Station, and then get funding for answering said question. This was roughly the scope of the experiment that [Chang-hyun Maeng] and colleagues ran back in 2022, with their […]
We aren’t sure why, but [Lev Chizhov] and some other researchers have found a way to make you smell things by hitting your head with ultrasound. Apparently, your sense of smell lives in your olfactory bulb, and no one, until now, has thought to try zapping it with ultrasound to see what happens. The bulb […]
We’ve probably all had a few conversations with people who hold eccentric scientific ideas, and most of the time they yield nothing more than frustration and perhaps a headache. In [Bertrand Selva]’s case, however, a conversation with a flat-earth believer yielded a device that uses a pair of gyroscopes to detect earth’s rotation, demonstrating that […]
Today’s pressurized water reactors (PWRs) are marvels of nuclear fission technology that enable gigawatt-scale power stations in a very compact space. Though they are extremely safe, with only the TMI-2 accident releasing a negligible amount of radioactive isotopes into the environment per the NRC, the company Deep Fission reckons that they can make PWRs even […]
A Crookes radiometer, despite what many explanations claim, does not work because of radiation pressure. When light strikes the vanes inside the near-vacuum chamber, it heats the vanes, which then impart some extra energy to gas molecules bouncing off of them, causing the vanes to be pushed in the opposite direction. On the other hand, […]
We aren’t here to praise the penny, but rather, to bury it. The penny, and its counterparts, have been vanishing all around the world as the cost of minting one far outweighs its value. But hackers had already lost a big asset: real copper pennies, and now even the cheaply made ones are doomed to […]
Can a shape pass through itself? That is to say, if one had two identical solids, would it be possible to orient one such that a hole could be cut through it, allowing the other to pass through without breaking the first into separate pieces? It turns out that the answer is yes, at least […]
Among the many science toys that have fallen out of fashion since we started getting nervous around things like mercury, chlorinated hydrocarbons, and radiation is the spinthariscope, which let people watch the flashes of light on a phosphor screen as a radioactive material decayed behind it. In fact, they hardly expose their viewers to any […]