Category archives: Technology

A extremely rare set of 4 quasars Astronomers have spotted an extremely rare grouping of four quasars within about 650,000 light-years of space. The odds against finding four so close together are 10 million to one. The rare quartet exists in an unusually bright nebula that has scientists scratching their heads as well. National Geographic […]

One of the main features of a F1 car is aerodynamics. How the car minimizes the drag imposed by the fact it is moving through a fluid, air, and how it takes advantage of the forces this movement generates to keep it stuck to the track, are most important for its performance. Even though the […]

Graphene, carbon nanotubes help spiders spin stronger webs Several spiders sprayed with mixtures of water and either graphene particles or carbon nanotubes went on to weave markedly stronger webs, according to researchers at the University of Trento in Italy. The scientists found that webs made by spiders sprayed with the nanotubes produced the strongest silk […]

Enantiomers are any two molecules that are mirror images of each other, in the same way that, within a same person, left and right hands are: both hands look exactly the same but indeed they are not, as they cannot be superimposed. This is very easily seen when we try to put the wrong glove […]

Cosmic Rays as Thunderstorm Probes Radio waves generated by cosmic rays provide an unprecedented view of the elusive electric fields in thunderstorms. Physics U.S. agencies to develop organs-on-chips The NIH, FDA and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will collaborate on the development of 3D miniature models of organs and tissues on microchips that will be […]

It is widely accepted that low carbon technologies will contribute to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, mostly those coming from carbon dioxide, and thus slow down the global warming. That’s why most of the largest economies in the world have committed to reduce their gas emissions by supporting an unprecedented transition from the current fossil-fuel based […]

At low temperatures, the resistivity of a metal (the inverse of its conductivity) is nearly constant. As the temperature of a material is lowered and as we approach absolute zero the resistivity should approach a constant value. Many metals, known as normal metals, behave in this way. The behaviour of another class of metals and […]

Achieving room temperature superconductivity is among the most pursued but elusive goals of scientists. A paper uploaded to the arXiv in December 2014 claims to have observed superconductivity as high as 190 K in hydrogen sulfide at high pressure, breaking all the records thus far. If this observation is confirmed, cuprates will be knocked from […]

Diagram shows newly-found giant magma reservoir underneath Yellowstone A huge reservoir of mostly solid hot rock has been found underneath a magma chamber beneath Yellowstone National Park, part of the vast volcanic plumbing of the area diagrammed in a study published in Science. This system has been there for about 17 million years, and scientists […]

There are some concepts in physics difficult to grasp. Mainly because we have no direct evidence of them and, in orther to get some understanding, we rely on analogies that are not strictly correct. One of these difficult concepts is the spin of the electron. The analogy for the spin usually goes this way: Imagine […]