Collaborate Disseminate
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell says she has battled “imposter syndrome” at many points in her career as a physicist. Continue reading Physicist Wins $3 Million Prize for Discovering Pulsars, Donates it All to Promoting Diversity in STEM
In a field where components and systems are often known by sterile strings of characters that manufacturers assign or by cutesy names that are clearly products of the marketing department and their focus groups, having your name attached to an innovation is rare. Rarer still is the case where the mere mention of an otherwise obscure inventor’s name brings up a complete schematic in the listener’s mind.
Given how rarely such an honor is bestowed, we’d be forgiven to think that Sidney Darlington’s only contribution to electronics is the paired transistor he invented in the 1950s that bears his name …read more
2018 Nobel Prize winner Gerard Mourou made a music video where female dancers tear off their lab coats. Continue reading Physicist’s ‘Inappropriate’ Music Video Resurfaces After He Wins the Nobel Prize
Lederman sold his Nobel Prize at auction for $765,000 in 2015 in order to pay for medical bills. Continue reading Leon Lederman, Nobel-Winning Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘God Particle,’ Dead at 96
Strickland and Gérard Mourou discovered a way to stretch and amplify laser beams in the 1980s. Continue reading Donna Strickland Wins Nobel Prize for Pioneering Work That Led to Development of Laser Tools
If you watch Star Trek, you will know one way to get rid of pesky aliens is to vent antimatter. The truth is, antimatter is a little less exotic than it appears on TV, but for a variety of reasons there hasn’t been nearly as much practical research done with it. There are well over 200 electron accelerators in labs around the world, but only a handful that work with positrons, the electron’s anti-counterpart. [Dr. Aakash Sahai] would like to change that. He’s got a new design that could bring antimatter beams out of the lab and onto the desktop. …read more
Continue reading Creating Antimatter On The Desktop — One Day
A trebuchet is one of the older machines of war. It’s basically a sling on a frame, with a weight that you can lift up high and which pulls the sling arm over on release. Making one opens up the doors to backyard mayhem, but optimizing one opens up the wonders of physics.
[Tom Stanton] covers just about everything you need to know about trebuchet building in his four-part video series. Indeed, he sums it up in video two: you’ve got some potential energy in the weight, and you want to transfer as much of that as possible to the …read more
Batteries placed in harm’s way need to be protected. A battery placed where a breakdown could endanger a life needs to be protected. Lithium-ion batteries on the bottoms of electric cars are subject to accidental damage and they are bathed in flame-retardant epoxy inside a metal sled. Phone batteries are hidden behind something that will shatter or snap before the battery suffers and warrant inspection. Hoverboard batteries are placed behind cheap plastic, and we have all seen how well that works. Batteries contain chemicals with a high density of energy, so the less exploding they do, the better.
Researchers at …read more
A bend and a twist make dry noodles break in half, instead of shattering all over the kitchen. Continue reading Finally, We Know How to Break Dry Spaghetti Noodles Perfectly In Half
Physics-based animation can be used to test the strength of bridges, make hyper-real animated films, and blow your mind. Continue reading We Talked to a Scientist Who Makes Those Incredibly Satisfying Computer Animations