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Physicists in Europe have reported that it’s possible to transport charged particles on a truck for four hours without disturbing them in any way. This seemingly run-of-the-mill announcement, reported in Nature on May 14, actually contains within its details the possibility of “a new era of precision antimatter spectroscopy”
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Physics often involves hidden surprises in how matter behaves at the smallest scales. A fundamental property in physics is angular momentum, which describes how things spin or rotate, from planets all the way down to particles. Angular momentum is involved in many important effects like magnetism and quantum states that
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Remember the periodic table from your high school classroom? The table orders elements by how the valence electrons in their atoms are arranged. However, quantum physics calculations predict that in elements with atomic number greater than 103, the electrons are arranged in new, unusual ways. This is because these electrons
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Lasers can produce a slender beam of light of just one wavelength. For this simple feature, they are everywhere in modern technology, from the internet to medical devices and even in entertainment as holograms. However, traditional lasers have some limitations. For example, to use them in particular applications, engineers currently
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Imagine you’ve put together a torchlight. You know exactly how each part of the device works. You know exactly how they’re all connected togetger. Yet when you put in fresh batteries and turn it on, the light flickers. You take the torchlight apart, check each component piece by
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From ’Sharks hunt via Lévy flights’, Physics World, June 11, 2010: They were menacing enough before, but how would you feel if you knew sharks were employing advanced mathematical concepts in their hunt for the kill? Well, this is the case, according to new research, which has tracked the movement
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A heatwave is like the COVID-19 virus. During the pandemic, the virus infected and killed many people. When vaccines became available, the mortality rate dropped even though the virus continued to spread. But vaccines weren’t the only way to keep people from dying. The COVID-19 virus killed more people
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In physics, the second law of thermodynamics says that a closed system tends to become more disordered over time. This disorder is captured in an entity called entropy. Many devices, especially clocks, are affected by this law because they need to tick regularly to measure time. But every tick creates
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Scientists have made a new material that is both a quasicrystal and antiferromagnetic — a combination never seen before. Quasicrystals are a special kind of solid. Unlike normal crystals, whose atoms are arranged in repeating patterns, quasicrystals have patterns that never exactly repeat but which still have an overall order. While
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In the last two or three years, groups of scientists from around the world have made several claims that they had discovered a room-temperature superconductor. Many of these claims concerned high-pressure superconductors — materials that superconduct electricity at room temperature but only if they are placed under extreme pressure (a million
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Featured image: An example of zellij tilework in the Al Attarine Madrasa in Fes, Morocco (2012), with complex geometric patterns on the lower walls and a band of calligraphy above. Caption and credit: just_a_cheeseburger (CC BY) 'Quasi' means almost. It's an unfair name for
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A particle collider is a machine that energises two beams of subatomic particles and smashes them head on. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe is the world's largest and most famous particle collider. It accelerates (with the effect of energising) two beams of protons to nearly the