Before Pilkingtons invented plate glass in the mid-19th century, flat panes could not be made. Old windows are uneven. Some once thought this was because glass is a liquid that flows down slowly over the…
The Patriots ran away with the AFC Championship. What did deflated footballs have to do with it?
USA Today Sports / Reuters
News reports say that 11 of the 12 game balls used by the New England Patriots in their AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts were deflated, showing about 2 pounds per square inch (psi…
Wicked fast communication.
Universities of Bristol and Dundee
Your home internet connection works in one of two ways. One involves using a copper wire, probably your telephone line, to send electrical signals from the internet provider to your home and back. This…
Matthew McConaughey
embodies the heroic scientist in Interstellar.
Paramount
Declan Fahy, American University School of Communication
Interstellar’s protagonists spend a significant portion of the movie’s 169-minute running time giving mini-lectures – sometimes with props and a little whiteboard – on theoretical physics. The characters…
Dr Andrew Stephenson and Dr Anthony Jacko examine the longest running laboratory experiment in the world.
Something strange is happening within the world-famous pitch drop experiment with the latest drop forming much faster than the last couple of drops. There have been nine drops so far and all attention…
Interstellar stars Anne Hathaway, Matthew McConaughey and Jessica Chastain glitzing it up for the European premiere.
EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga
Poor old Richard Branson. SpaceShipTwo has only just stopped smouldering after struggling to get more than 20km from the Earth and there’s the Nolan brothers getting Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway…
Before the big bang.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Scientists working on an experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US have taken a step forward in developing a technology which could significantly reduce the size of particle accelerators…
Frozen cold but not the way beyond absolute zero.
Flickr/kriimurohelisedsilmad
Absolute zero is the temperature (-273.15C) at which all motion in matter stops and is thought to be unreachable. But recent experiments using ultracold atoms have measured temperatures that are, in fact…
Many different worlds but a finite number.
Flickr/fdecomite
Parallel universes – worlds where the dinosaur-killing asteroid never hit, or where Australia was colonised by the Portuguese – are a staple of science fiction. But are they real? In a radical paper published…
Don’t fear losing that ball, the waves will bring them back.
You would normally expect objects that float in water to move in the same direction as waves. But now we can force floating objects to move in the opposite direction. This unexpected effect nicknamed a…
Despite the slightly shallower (and slower) Tollcross pool, Australia’s Daniel Fox set a world record in the Men’s 200m Freestyle S14 heat.
Joe Giddens/PA Wire
You may have seen some controversy regarding water depth in the Tollcross International Swimming Centre being used for competition at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games. The pool has a movable floor that allows…
Ethane in three forms: subcritical, critical and supercritical.
Dr. Sven Horstmann
When we boil a kettle, we observe what scientists call a phase transition: the water changes from being a liquid to a gas as water becomes less dense. One litre of water boils to give about 1,000 litres…
Cilcik on the image to learn how stars are made. Picture: NASA.
How are stars formed? What are they made of? And what happens to them when they die? In this week’s TCTV, astrophysicist Akila Jeeson-Daniel explains the physics behind the balls of gas that light up the…
In September 2013, I wrote for The Conversation about the way reform of A-level exams was being conducted and the worrying implications for subject content and assessment. These concerns were echoed by…
Figure skating is always the highlight of the Winter Olympics. With the introduction of a team competition this year, there are five figure skating events. And we’ve already seen much drama with records…
Superheated plasma inside the tokamak reactor, a split second before a fusion reaction.
Scott Silburn/James Harrison/Alex Meakins
Paul Norman, University of Birmingham and Lee Packer, Culham Centre for Fusion Energy
The latest results from the National Ignition Facility in the US represent the passing of a nuclear fusion power milestone and come after a year of significant progress at projects in France and the UK…
Electricity – just one bright idea to stem from physics.
Flickr/JonathanCohen
AUSTRALIA 2025: How will science address the challenges of the future? In collaboration with Australia’s chief scientist Ian Chubb, we’re asking how each science discipline will contribute to Australia…
How long can you stay there depends on practice and physics.
elisfanclub
“Tide goes in, tide goes out…you can’t explain that.” So claimed US talkshow anchor Bill O’Reilly, in a baffling attempt to discredit atheism which became something of a YouTube sensation. I have been…
Muons, a type of lepton, are studied at the Large Hadron Collider – but what are they?
CERN
The giant Large Hadron Collider at CERN’s lab in Europe may be closed until 2015 but experiments will still be run there in the second half of this year on much smaller synchrotrons that examined the decay…
Everything around you is made of elements that scientists have studied in quite some detail over the last 200 years. But all that understanding breaks down when these elements are subjected to high pressure…