Here’s a new invention that, while potentially useful, is even more interesting as an illustration of the nature of sound: the acoustic prism. When light enters a prism made of some refractive material, the sub-components of that light have their paths affected slightly differently, based on their wavelength (color); the …

Like modern day alchemists, scientists are attempting to transform a common element into a precious metal. This isn’t about making lead into gold, but turning elemental hydrogen into a different, never before seen form of hydrogen. Scientists are tantalizingly close to producing the first samples of solid metallic hydrogen using …

A fifth fundamental force, perhaps discovered as part of the search for dark matter, has been reported in a new paper published in Physical Review Letters. The results still need further analysis, but they represent a step forward for an idea that has caused several months of controversy in open-source journals, …

Strange things go on when you push physics to extremes. Extending Moore’s Law to its physical conclusion, we run into problems like the traces in circuits being so small that electrons can quantum tunnel between them. But electrons aren’t the only thing we can use to carry data through circuits. …

For the first time, a team of scientists have captured all phases of a classical nova explosion — before, during, and after the event. The event took place back in 2009, but at first the astronomers didn’t even realize they’d captured such an unusual occurrence. After going back and looking …

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has run into an unanticipated problem — it’s running out of disk space. “This year the LHC is stable and reliable,” says Jorg Wenninger, head of operations at the LHC. “It is working like clockwork. We don’t have much downtime.” That’s actually the problem. When …

An international collaboration of researchers from UMass Amherst, HP, and the Air Force have built a proof-of-concept memristor that could lead to real-world neuromorphic chips. The memristor is made of a silicon-oxygen-nitrogen material laced with clumps of silver nanoparticles at the electrical terminals. When current is applied across the memristor, the silver nanoparticles shuffle around …

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to David J. Thouless, Duncan Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz for “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.” Their work represents a set of mathematical insights about exotic phases of matter like superfluids and superconductors, but it …

Type Ia supernovae are affectionately called “standard candles” in astronomy. They’re blessedly predictable, so we use them to measure distances. The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics went to three astronomers who used standard candles to reach the same conclusion based on the same data: namely, that the universe is expanding …

Ever since the historic discovery of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometry Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO), scientists have been trying to amend and refine that data. The original idea was that the first confirmed detection of gravitational waves was the result of a binary black hole event: two black holes …