Chemistry • Computer science • Condensed matter • Materials • Physics
Water has puzzled scientists for decades. For the last 30 years or so, they have theorized that when cooled down to a very low temperature like -100 ºC, water might be able to separate into two liquid phases of different densities. Like oil and water, these phases don’t mix and may help explain some of […]
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is one of the most important modes of climate variability worldwide, with large impacts on the weather conditions in many regions, and thus on agriculture and economy. It is related to changes in the sea surface temperatures in the Tropical Pacific Ocean. Periods with higher temperatures cause the so-called […]
When polar seas freeze and ice forms, it is not only due to cold air chilling the surface of the water. Even more important is that warm water is prevented from rising to the surface from the depths of the ocean, due to the much lower salinity of the surface water. Sea ice forms in […]
The migration of carbon atoms on the surface of the nanomaterial graphene was recently measured for the first time. Although the atoms move too swiftly to be directly observed with an electron microscope, their effect on the stability of the material can now be determined indirectly while the material is heated on a microscopic hot […]
One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer. They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms […]
Astronomy • Biology • Microbiology • Physics
Authors: Predrag Slijepcevic, Senior Lecturer in Biology, Brunel University London and Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe, Honorary Professor, University of Buckingham Are we alone in the universe? The famous Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme has been trying to answer this question since 1959. American astronomer Carl Sagan, and many others, believed that other human-like civilisations must […]
When Cern’s gargantuan accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), fired up ten years ago, hopes abounded that new particles would soon be discovered that could help us unravel physics’ deepest mysteries. Dark matter, microscopic black holes and hidden dimensions were just some of the possibilities. But aside from the spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson […]
Quick simulations of space orbits and trajectories are essential in different aspects of space engineering, from the optimization of trajectories and orbit transfers, to the determination of the orbits themselves, altitude control, and gravitational modelling. Although the preliminary analysis of satellite space orbits can be done without extensive simulations, to represent the dynamical states of […]
Let me make a short interruption in our series about the prehistory of philosophy of science, to discuss a completely different point. I am writing this now, just because in the last days I think I have been able to clearly formulate a specific perplexity that for many years I had felt about what we […]
The concept of crystal is very old, and it is strongly related to symmetries. Basically, a crystal is a system with a repeated pattern through space. For instance, in ice the water molecules form a hexagonal pattern, giving rise to many different macroscopic forms. But, can it happen that a system presents a pattern not […]