Look into my eyes. The eyes, the eyes. Not around the eyes. Don’t look AROUND the eyes. Look INTO my eyes. The eyes… [click] You’re not under! But… Can you read my mind? Continue reading Eyes of the Beholder→
Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL scientists were able to take the first ever snapshot of light behaving simultaneously both as a wave AND as a stream of particles. You need light to take a photograph. But how do you take a photograph of light?Continue reading Seeing the Light Fantastic – Particles, Waves and All→
1/60 minute. 1/3,600 hour. 1/86,400 day. 1/1 hertz. The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of a 133 55Cs caesium isotope corresponds to one second. But what does it look like? And where might you find a second? Continue reading Just a Second…→
Deep down, in huge subterranean caverns… Underneath the Franco-Swiss border… 300 feet underground… lies a beast of unprecedented power… and mystery. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that man summons to explore the uncharted corners of the sub-atomic realm… After two years of a deep slumber, the mighty beast has awoken…Continue reading Physics at 13 TeV – Cranking Up the LHC→
Still in its early stages, El Niño has the potential to cause extreme and even devastating weather around the World. According to climate graphs, we have reached a 0.6 value for the ENSO. It’s a 60% probability. El Niño is now officially back. Continue reading El Niño – Return of the ‘Enfant Terrible’→
Ever since the early days of human space travel, back in the 1960s, astronauts have run experiments involving plants in space. Over a million seeds of rocket (two kilograms of rocket seeds) are shortly due to take off from Florida, bound for the International Space Station, as part of British ESA astronaut Tim Peake’s six-month Principia mission. Continue reading Space-Age Rocket→
It’s late o’clock at night. All alone in the night? Enjoy this amazing time footage flyover of the Earth from the International Space Station. Absolutely uplifting… Positively enthralling… Continue reading All Alone in the Night…→
The Standard Model of Particle Physics describes the fundamental particles and their interactions via the strong, electromagnetic and weak forces, providing precise predictions for measurable quantities that can be tested experimentally. Here’s the latest!! It’s hot!!! It’s exciting!!! At least, if you’re a particle physicist…Continue reading Rare Beauty Decays at CERN→
One of the all-time most interesting elements in the Periodic Table, nitrogen is a colourless, odourless, inert diatomic gas that makes up to 78% of the Earth’s atmosphere. We breathe it everyday, although an atmosphere of pure nitrogen is nefarious to animal and human life. It is vital to life and plants simply strive on it. Nitrogen compounds are explosive, and nations have gone to war over it. It can feed… or kill.Continue reading Nitrogen – Nature’s Explosive Building Blocks→
Expedition 43 astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti snapped this photograph of herself wearing the Starfleet uniform from TV series “Star Trek: Voyager” aboard the International Space Station, and posted it on her Twitter account @AstroSamantha last month.
About four billion people on our planet actually live in places with no house numbers, no street names, or without anything that constitutes a proper address. They are effectively off-the-map, with no voting rights or access to public utilities. A new company called What3Words proposes to revolutionise that…Continue reading Where The Streets Have No Name→
What Pickpockets Know and Your Brain Would Rather Not Tell You
Be under no illusion. You saw the sign: “Pickpockets are operating in this area”. You reacted. Instantly. The first thing you did was to check your pockets or handbag for signs of financial solvability. All is well. You relax. Only now, you’ve become the “mark”… because you’ve just given away precious information about the location of your valuables around your body. Continue reading The Illusion of Choice – Now You See It, Now You Don’t…→
Surrounding the town of El Ejido, Almeria Province, southern Spain is a sea of greenhouses, stretching for tens of kilometres, visible from space. Millions of tons of vegetables are exported from there to other European countries and further parts of the World. Along the Mediterranean coast, tourism flourishes, fuelling a booming real estate economy… Continue reading Food as Geopolitical Subjugation – Welcome to Plastic City, Almería!→
Should you ever have wondered what the Higgs boson sounds like… It’s… “AS LOUD AS A RIFF BY JOE SATRIANI. WHAT?! IT’S AS LOUD… AS A…” Oh, wait!! Here it is. Continue reading The Sound of Physics→
Geothermal energy prospectors have long used gravity meters in their search for the right subsurface characteristics. But these have been point measurements. GOCE now provides this information across the World at a resolution never before achieved on that scale. Continue reading Geothermics and Gravity – The IRENA Global Atlas for Renewable Energy→
This is the Jasper Project. Over 325,000 photovoltaic panels capable of producing 180,000 MWh of clean energy every year and support the needs of almost 80,000 households. More and more solar farms are being built across Africa. Solar energy is on the rise.Continue reading Sunrise over an African Power Revolution→
“Dark matter?” You cannot see it. But there is something there. As for what it is, it’s anybody’s guess! Dark matter does not interact with light. At all. Which makes it difficult to detect.“But if you cannot see it? How do you know it is in fact there?” Well, it does interact with gravity, and as it does so it bends the path of any light ray passing nearby... “And did it really kill the dinosaurs…?”Continue reading That Mysterious Missing Matter – Cocktail Party Physics→
A ground-breaking one-year space mission involving twin astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly should help doctors, scientists and mission planners better understand the physical and psychological impacts of a long-duration spaceflight. Continue reading The Real-Life Space Twin Paradox→
That’s how this TED video on the Higgs boson begins. I say two guys… It’s more like one physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN – the European laboratory for Particle Physics – aka Dave Barney, and a Blues singer, aka Steve Goldfarb, in the guise of a pink slug… Continue reading The Basics of the Higgs Boson Explained→
Right on cue, day turned into a sudden eerie twilight as a great swathe of the Earth’s surface quickly plunged into transient darkness. The magic number is 400. For many observers, weather conditions were far from ideal. Clouds obscured the much awaited spectacle of the 2015 eclipse. Thankfully, alternatives were available to astronomers keen not to miss the big event…Continue reading 400 – Anatomy of a Solar Eclipse→
Four states of matter can be seen in everyday life: solid, liquid, gas, and – somewhat more exotically – plasma. As a tightly bound combination of oxygen and hydrogen atoms, a water molecule is nothing out of the ordinary. Liquid water, steam or ice are still just water. Yet, it is intriguing to see how the very same building blocks of matter are capable of producing such broadly distinct states. Continue reading Changing States – Fundamental Phases of Matter→
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