physics

Almost anytime physicists announce that they’ve discovered a new particle, whether it’s the Higgs boson or the recently bagged double-charm tetraquark, what they’ve actually spotted is a small bump rising from an otherwise smooth curve on a…

Image: Faraday FutureFaraday Future has been up to no good. Seven months after the company’s IPO, it’s come to light the company lied about the number of preorders it received for its “upcoming” FF 91 EV. Bloomberg reports after an internal…

Image: FordWe’re fans of the Maverick’s “Flexbed” — basically Ford’s name for the bed on its smallest pickup that contains a lot of handy features, like slots for wood planks to divide cargo, threaded holes for DIY rails, convenient 12-volt…

Blowing soap bubbles never fails to delight one's inner child, perhaps because bubbles are intrinsically ephemeral, bursting after just a few minutes. Now, French physicists have succeeded in creating "everlasting bubbles" out of plastic…

So what if, instead of launching atop a chemical rocket, your object could just ride up on a cable that reaches all the way into space? That's what would happen with a space elevator.Space Elevator BasicsSuppose you built a giant tower that…

Fluids can be roughly divided into two categories: regular ones and weird ones. Regular ones, like water and alcohol, act more or less as expected when pumped through pipes or stirred with a spoon. Lurking among the weird ones—which include…

In Poul Anderson's 1970 novel Tau Zero, a starship crew seeks to travel to the star Beta Virginis in hopes of colonizing a new planet. The ship's mode of propulsion is a "Bussard ramjet," an actual (though hypothetical) means of propulsion…

Lia Siegelman had just been studying the swirling waters of the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, when she happened to come across a poster image of cyclones around Jupiter’s north pole, taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. “I looked…

So Dwyer and his team turned to the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a network of thousands of small radio telescopes mostly in the Netherlands. LOFAR usually gazes at distant galaxies and exploding stars. But according to Dwyer, “it just so…

There's actually another good reason to use infrared light for the JWST: It's difficult to get an unobstructed view of far-away celestial objects thanks to the gas and dust that are the detritus from old stars. These can scatter visible…