To evade friction, try taking a quantum shortcut. Two teams of physicists are building tiny machines designed to operate with the maximum possible efficiency. According to thermodynamics, there’s an ultimate limit to the efficiency of machines known as heat engines — including steam engines and car engines — which convert heat into motion or other […]
As Facebook tries to get ahead of public pressure about what the service does and doesn’t track about its users, a patent application has emerged which would enable something that the service’s detractors have long theorized and feared: silently triggered microphones that keep tabs on Facebook users. The patent, filed by Facebook in December 2016 […]
A discovery by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory supports a century-old theory by Albert Einstein that explains how heat moves through everything from travel mugs to engine parts. The transfer of heat is fundamental to all materials. This new research, published in the journal Science, explored thermal insulators, which are […]
Early Friday morning, SpaceX will launch its 15th cargo mission to the International Space Station for NASA, sending up nearly 6,000 pounds of supplies on top of its Falcon 9 rocket. On board the vehicle are shipments of food and water for the six astronauts living on the ISS, as well as new science experiments […]
NASA announced yesterday that its highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope is delaying its launch — again. It was announced in March that the mission would be delayed until 2020, which is already two years past its original launch date of October 2018. But after accepting the recommendations of an independent review board, NASA has […]
Apple surprised us all on Monday when it released the first iOS 12 public beta late in the afternoon. Apple typically releases new iOS betas around mid-day, and the company also typically waits until a couple more developer beta versions have been released before it issues the first public beta of its annual iOS update. […]
Physicists at the University of Bonn have succeeded in putting a superconducting gas into an exotic state. Their experiments allow new insights into the properties of the Higgs particle, but also into fundamental characteristics of superconductors. The publication, which is already available online, will soon appear in the journal Nature Physics. For their experiments, scientists […]
Keeping track of the mechanical health of millions of pieces of equipment is a big job for the Army. To help with this data-intensive work, it’s recruiting an AI assistant. Machine learning software developed by Chicago firm Uptake Technologies will be used to predict when vehicles will need repair, flagging problems to army mechanics before […]
It looks like Apple and Samsung are finally burying the hatchet over the long-standing US patent dispute they’ve been fighting for the past several years. According to Reuters, the settlement was filed at the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Wednesday. No terms were disclosed. The original lawsuit saw Apple go […]
It took nearly a century of trial and error for human scientists to organize the periodic table of elements, arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements in chemistry, into its current form. A new artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by Stanford physicists accomplished the same feat in just a few hours. Called Atom2Vec, the program […]
Harvard University researchers are using physics to solve one of the biggest challenges in designing light-weight, long-lasting batteries: how to squeeze more energy into less space. Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Physics have developed a tunable, electrochemical system that can store large […]
A theoretical reevaluation of the muon’s magnetic moment gives the highest precision prediction so far, while doubling down on a discrepancy with experiments. The muon anomalous magnetic moment aμ is an important and unique quantity in subatomic physics, since its value represents a sum over all known standard model physics. This wide sensitivity exists because […]
