How nonequilibrium thermodynamics speaks to the mystery of life
In his 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that organisms stay alive precisely by staving off…
Category: Physics
The return of supersolids!
We learn it from a young age: solids hold their shapes; liquids flow. Physical states of matter are mutually exclusive.…
The wild weirdness of topological insulators
For more than 200 years, physicists have wanted to understand why electricity flows through some materials and not others. In…
Every breath we take
Back in Christmas 2013, the CineStar cinema in Mainz, Germany, became an impromptu, oversized laboratory. Over the course of 108…
Preserving the Past
The George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, is the oldest photography museum in the world. The Victorian mansion that…
Computing’s Search for Quantum Questions
It was billed as the vindication of the quantum computer. Late last year, researchers at Google announced that a quantum…
All about quantum dots
In September 2015, Philips, an electronics company based in The Netherlands, unveiled a computer monitor that achieved a brilliant color…
The Mars Anomaly
Credit: NASA The presence of water isn’t the only Mars mystery scientists are keen to probe. Another centers around a…
Feeling Objects that Aren’t There
Imagine this. You wake up in the morning to the irritating buzz of your alarm. Instead of fumbling for a…
Going deep
HOW low can you go? Dedicated deep cavers plumb the depths for an answer, and a newly announced expedition…