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 […]
One of the most important features of thermodynamics is that it has improved human quality of life amazingly during the last centuries. Since in 1606, the Spanish inventor Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont patented the first steam engine a great effort has been done in developing new and better thermal machines. Internal combustion engines, heat […]
Is there anyone that doesn’t know the sport of curling? Just in case: curling is a winter sport played indoors where two teams take turns sliding rocks on ice, trying to place them as close as possible to the button, a target area of four concentric rings placed about 30m away. One curler delivers the […]
Last month, a lot of newspapers and websites have been promoting this article on Nature referring to a recent preprint uploaded by Stephen W. Hawking to the internet repository ArXiv. In this work, summarizing what he talked about in a conference given last August, the English physicist argue that, since event horizons, the definitory property […]
It has been a long time since we have learned that “going nano” leads to new properties arising from matter. One of those size-dependent properties that promises huge benefits due to its potential applications is magnetism. Magnetic materials are classified according to their susceptibility to magnetic fields into diamagnetic, paramagnetic and ferromagnetic materials, the first […]
The second law of thermodynamics is one of the oldest and most tested physical laws. Unfortunately, it prevents us from doing very useful things, like creating a perpetual motion machine of the second kind. This law is extremely important for both theoretical and practical purposes and, because of that, it has been broadly studied since […]