Credit: DepositphotosWhen it comes to moving furniture, mathematicians aren’t usually the first people we think to consult. And why would they be? For nearly six decades, they couldn’t definitively answer whether your stylish three-seater could navigate that tricky turn into your apartment hallway.However, Jineon Baek, a mathematics enthusiast from Yonsei University in South Korea,...
Credit: PixabayWhen you bake a loaf of bread or a batch of muffins, you place the dough in a pan. As it bakes, the dough expands into the pan, causing any chocolate chips or blueberries to spread farther apart.In some ways, the Universe’s expansion is similar. However, there’s a key difference: while dough expands...
Scientists have accidentally discovered a strange particle that has mass when it moves in one direction, but is massless while moving in anotherDepositphotosScientists have accidentally discovered a particle that has mass when moving in one direction but lacks mass when traveling in another. Known as semi-Dirac fermions, these particles with peculiar behavior were first...
Eduard Muzhevskyi/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)A decade-long experiment has provided the first glimpse into the chaotic hurricane of particles inside neutron, paving the way to solve a fundamental mystery about the building blocks of matter.Using data from the Central Neutron Detector at the US Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National §Accelerator Facility (TJNAF), researchers are...
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image LabAstrophysicists have detected the highest-energy electrons ever recorded, raining down on Earth from a mysterious nearby source. These cosmic rays carry trillions of times the energy of visible light, suggesting they originate from a powerful source relatively close to our solar system.Earth is constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation,...
Credit: PixabayMeasuring time in our world of ticking clocks and swinging pendulums is as straightforward as counting seconds between "then" and "now."However, at the quantum scale, where electrons buzz unpredictably, "then" becomes difficult to pinpoint, and "now" often dissolves into uncertainty. In such cases, a traditional stopwatch is simply ineffective.A potential answer may lie...
The shadow of a laser beam can be seen as the small dark line across the blue lightR. A. Abrahao, H. P. N. Morin, J. T. R. Pagé, A. Safari, R. W. Boyd, J. S. LundeenA new experiment has demonstrated something seemingly impossible: light casting its own shadow. When a laser is manipulated in...
Hacking a 50-bit RSA key is so easy you could do it with your cell phone in secondsRecent headlines claim Chinese researchers used D-Wave quantum computers to hack RSA, AES, and "military-grade encryption." This is both true and misleading.A May 2024 white paper in the Chinese Journal of Computers details how researchers used D-Wave's...
(Nobel Prize Outreach/Alexander Mahmoud)If you've enjoyed an AI-generated video, fraud protection, or voice-to-text, you can thank scientists like physicist John Hopfield and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton. On Oct. 8, 2024, they received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work on artificial neural networks, which, though inspired by biology, relied heavily on statistical...
Credit: PixabayThe term "atom," derived from Latin for "indivisible," can be misleading. A recent simulation by U.S. theoretical physicists has provided a detailed microscopic view of how an atom splits in two, shedding light on an energetic event that has significantly impacted science and technology.In 1938, physicists Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann...
