New Experiment Shows The Uncertainty Principle Isn’t as Uncertain as We Thought
The word uncertainty is used a lot in quantum mechanics. One school of thought is that this means there’s something out there in the world that we are uncertain about.…
Wild New Discovery Shows How We Can Switch Majorana Fermions On And Off
The particle known as a Majorana fermion is as mysterious and uncontrollable as it is unique. It’s the only known particle that is also its own antiparticle, and has properties…
A Superconducting Magnet Just Smashed The Strongest Magnetic Field Record
A new superconducting magnet has briefly sustained an astonishing 45.5 tesla magnetic field intensity. For comparison, your flimsy fridge magnets have about 1 percent of a single tesla. The measurement,…
Physicists Say They’ve Built a Test Sensitive Enough to Test The ‘Impossible’ EM Drive
For nearly 20 years, scientists have debated the viability of an EM Drive, a hypothetical type of engine that could propel a spacecraft without the need for any fuel. If…
Scientists Just Found a Previously Unknown Source of Magnetism Hidden Deep Inside Earth
New research has revealed a previously unknown source of magnetism deep within our planet’s stupidly hot, squishy layers. Far from being magnetically dead, some of Earth’s mantle might have pockets…
Incredible Video Shows a Jellyfish Get Sucked Into a Dizzying Bubble Ring
Imagine being a jellyfish just swimming along, minding your own business, when suddenly you’re taken for a nauseating ride in a wildly spinning vortex. This is exactly what happened to…
Official LHC Results Have Finally Confirmed The Structure of Mysterious Pentaquarks
New results from the Large Hadron Collider have confirmed it. The mysterious five-quark subatomic particle – the pentaquark, only discovered a few years ago – really is composed of two…
Physicists Have Finally Figured Out a Way to Save Schrödinger’s Cat
The famous cat-in-a-box thought experiment by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger is an illustration of one of the defining characteristics of quantum mechanics – the unpredictable behaviour of particles at the…
For The First Time, Physicists Have Produced a Stunning Type of Plasma Jet in The Lab
Plasma, that super-hot mix of electrified atomic particles, plays a key role in the evolution of stars, black holes, and other cosmic elements. For closer study though, plasma needs to…
The Bizarre Phenomenon of ‘Ball Lightning’ Has a Startling New Explanation
As far as mysteries of nature go, ball lightning is one of the more perplexing. It seems there are as many potential explanations as there are sightings, but in spite…
Hawking’s Greatest Black Hole Prediction Just Passed a New Test in The Lab
A lab-created analogue of a black hole has provided new evidence that these mysterious space objects really do emit radiation. This evidence is indirect: physicists have shown that the analogue…
100 Years Ago, Einstein And an Eclipse Changed Physics Forever
On May 29, 1919, a solar eclipse forever altered our conception of gravity, rewrote the laws of physics and turned a 40-year-old, wild-haired scientist into a global celebrity – the…
Scientists Trying to Make a Rare Type of Ice Just Stumbled Upon Something Even Weirder
All water ice is not made equal. Under certain conditions, its neatly ordered crystalline lattice molecules fall into disarray until it resembles the structural omnishambles of amorphous solids such as…
For The First Time, The Geometry of an Electron Has Been Mapped
If you’ve ever opened a science textbook, you’ve probably seen a picture of an atom, with a cluster of protons and neutrons making up its nucleus, around which whirls a…
Physicists Have Officially Smashed The Record For High-Temperature Superconductivity
Scientists in Germany have hit a new superconductivity milestone – achieving a resistance-free electrical current at the highest temperature yet: just 250 Kelvin, or -23 degrees Celsius (-9.4 degrees Fahrenheit).…
Mesmerising Experiment Shows The Strange Reaction of Vibrating Glass Beads Underwater
In 1787, the “father of acoustics” Ernst Chladni first recorded the pattern of behaviour of sand grains on a vibrating plate – the way that heavier particles travel away from…