Everyone has heard the sound of the crack of a whip, at least in movies or TV serials like “El Zorro: The man with the whip” (1954). A shock wave is created by the supersonic motion of the tip of the whip in the air . Whipping is a typical fluid instability of an accelerating […]
Science news with bad titles usually attract a lot of attention. A recent example is “The sound of an atom has been captured” ]. Laypeople must know that atoms do not emit sound. Quantum acoustics study the propagation and the interaction of phonons, the analogues in sound to photons in light. An atom cannot emit […]
A couple of weeks ago I had the chance of having a fulfilling chat with Riccardo Cerulli, one of DAMA main researchers. They are at the very center of a skepticism tornado about their results on Dark Matter direct detection, and I asked as many questions as he let me to try to solve this […]
Perhaps the most repeated words in the last few years when talking about graphene – since scientists Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for their groundbreaking experiments – are “the material of the future”. There are some risks regarding so many expectations about everything related to materials science, since […]
Of all the seven wonders of ancient times, only the pyramids of Egypt remain on their feet. The technical means Egyptians had that many years ago for building these huge structures were extremely limited, and that is the main reason for them being so fascinating: they could build them despite the huge technical difficulties they […]
When in April 1911 Kamerlingh Onnes and coworkers measured that the electrical resistivity of mercury suddenly vanished at 4.2K, they could not believe it. They repeated the experiment several times looking for a short circuit that could explain the weird observation. But any experimental set up was leading to the same result. They had discovered […]
What is a radiation dosimeter? Why do we need one? To give you an interesting and short response I will remind you what the Japanese government officials offered to Fukushima evacuees after the 2011 nuclear disaster. Having failed to reach their original radiation decontamination target, the government proposed that evacuees could return to their homes […]
Of all the advances made in theoretical physics in the last twenty years, I still have no doubt that the most impressive one is the so called Maldacena’s conjecture, the guess that the physics involved in some models of quantum gravity living in a very concrete 5-dimensional spacetime has a one-to-one correspondence with the physics […]
Bicycles are usually regarded as the most sustainable mean of transport for urban environments. Now, when talking about sustainability, there are usually two different discussions: on the one hand, there is energy sustainability, as the fossil fuels won’t last forever and their secondary products are quite unhealthy. Bikes, being powered by people, fully comply with […]
The most widely used metaphors for nuclear fusion reactors are the recreation of the Sun on Earth and the controlled explosion of a hydrogen bomb. In both cases, the first thing that comes to mind is the need for high-performance radiation-resistant materials to contain the fusion reaction. The selection and design of new materials that […]