Make mine a Laphroaig Islay single malt, at least 18 years in the barrel. Oh, and a side of water. Science says you can wipe that condescending smirk from your face, while you’re at it. A lot of whisky drinkers (or whiskey if you prefer the Irish spelling) will tell you a dash of H2O

A small tweak on a definitive experiment in quantum physics has allowed scientists to observe for the first time exactly how molecules behave as waves. The results are solidly in line with what theory covering complex quantum phenomena predicts, so don’t expect any radical new physics here. But as with most quantum experiments, the implications

It’s been about nine months since a team of CERN researchers succeeded in their goal of measuring the spectrum of light emitted from hydrogen’s mirror particle, antihydrogen. They were just getting started. Now the researchers have detailed evidence of the structure of antihydrogen using spectroscopy, setting a landmark in our quest to determine why there

Using a device not much bigger than a wine bottle, physicists have for the first time observed neutrinos physically colliding with the nucleus of an atom. The discovery provides physicists with another way to probe this ghostly particle, one that could help us better understand some of the Universe’s biggest mysteries.   Neutrinos are easy

It all started when a Ukrainian programmer and aspiring rapper dropped a handful of hydrogel balls on his piping-hot pancake griddle. The beads, used by gardeners to hydrate plants because they’re about 98 percent water, began to bounce. The man recorded their jig of little hops for several minutes, complete with the horrible screeching sounds the spheres

Scientists have observed how a magnetic dipole field can create what looks like a glowing, localised fireball inside a plasma chamber. By placing a regular dipole bar magnet near the surface of the cathode, the researchers were able to generate an intense “glowing, fireball like structure” inside the plasma chamber, which varied in its brightness

It’s been exactly 80 years since the theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana predicted that there were neutrally charged particles that were indistinguishable from their own antiparticle. None have been spotted in the wild, and not for want of looking. Physicists now have the next best thing – a particle-like system that behaves just like the kind

An odd phenomenon in quantum mechanics called backflow has just gotten a little weirder with new research showing not only can particles seem to ignore momentum and leap backwards, they are able to do so while a force urges them on. This is the first time the property has been theoretically mapped out to show

Scans taken of fluids moving through rock have shown engineers have had it wrong when it comes to substances flowing through porous materials. For the past century, the movement of gases and liquids through rocks has been modelled using a law that assumes they flow in a stable pattern. Under the microscope, it turns out

Not all ice is the same. In distant realms far beyond this world’s Slurpees, melting glaciers, and the Ice Bucket Challenge, water hardens into a solid state in strange ways that just aren’t possible here on Planet Earth. Now, for the first time, scientists have managed to catch one of these alien, otherworldly ices in

Not long ago, in the early 1990s, scientists only speculated that teleportation using quantum physics could be possible. Since then, the process has become a standard operation in quantum optics labs around the world. In fact, just last year, two separate teams conducted the world’s first quantum teleportation outside of a laboratory. Now, researchers in China

It’s not something many people think about when they drop a few ice cubes into their beverage of choice, but the tiny ice crystals that go into them are not perfect cubes – and no one has ever produced an ice cube formed from perfectly cubic crystals in the lab. But now researchers have come

The Large Hadron Collider has once again done what it does best – smash bits of matter together and find new particles in the carnage. This time physicists have come across a real charmer. It’s four times heavier than a proton and could help challenge some ideas about how this kind of matter sticks together.

One of the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics could be explained by an equally weird idea – that causation can run backwards in time as well as forwards. What Einstein called “spooky” action at a distance could theoretically be evidence of retrocausality, which is the particle equivalent of you getting a stomach ache today thanks

Owls have mastered the art of quiet flight in order to glide down on unsuspecting prey, and now scientists think we can follow their lead to quieten down wind turbines and aeroplanes – and it’s all to do with the serrated edges on the front of owl wings. Those serrations could help us keep down

If you’re feeling as if you’ve lost a bit of weight recently, blame physicists – recent calculations make the mass of the proton 30 billionths of a percent lighter than before. Okay, so the sub-atomic particle hasn’t changed size, but new experiments have promoted a rethink on what the proton probably weighs. Strangely, while the

Scientists have discovered that a simple model used to describe the formation an exotic type of quantum particle, an Efimov molecule, is wrong – flipping ten years of experimental data on its head. The result of this study came as a complete surprise to the researchers and has implications for our fundamental understanding of how

A review of three separate experiments has turned up “remarkably similar” results, pointing to what researchers say is a strong possibility that we’ve found hits of a phenomenon that goes beyond the standard model of particle physics.  When taken together, data from experiments conducted in the US, Switzerland, and Japan, have yielded a result with

Since the discovery of graphene in 2004, there’s been a proliferation of strange new two-dimensional materials. In all of them, scientists have been chasing one invaluable property – magnetism, which is crucial for data storage, medical devices, and electricity generators. After years of searching, many suspected that true two-dimensional magnets might not actually exist. But

When teachers explain ocean tides, they frequently describe how the Moon’s gravity pulls on Earth and all of its water. This, they often say, leads to a gravitational imbalance, which stretches the ocean into two opposing bulges: one that’s closest to the Moon (where the Moon’s gravity is strongest); and one on the opposite side

A 30-year debate has just been reignited by a physicist who appears to have found a mysterious new state of matter in an ordinary piece of glass. For decades, this unexplained phase transition has been sought in real-life materials, and now that we have evidence for it, scientists around the world are trying to understand

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) still has plenty of good work left to do in the field of particle acceleration, but scientists are already starting work on its replacement, set to be three times as big as the (already huge) original. Development on the LHC’s replacement is expected to take decades, which is why experts

Imagine you took all sunlight that hits our planet at any given moment, and focussed it on one (unfortunate) piece of Earth the size of a thumbnail. Now times that blistering intensity by 100, and you’re beginning to understand the insanity of the world’s most powerful X-ray laser. In a surprise result, scientists have focussed

Our current understanding of the Universe states that it’s governed by four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.  But there are hints of a fifth force of nature, and if it exists, we’d not only be able to fill the remaining holes in Einstein’s general relativity – we’d have to

Literature professor Simon John James and physicist Richard Bower were both involved in curating the exhibition, Time Machines – the past, the future, and how stories take us there. Their conversations quickly revealed to them the many, wildly various, meanings of “time travel”. Here, they discuss how time travelling in literary and scientific terms might,

New research has expanded on the discovery of a strange phenomenon called blackbody force, showing that the effect of radiation on particles surrounding massive objects can be magnified by the space that warps around them. The find could affect how we model the formation of stars and planets, and even help us finally detect a theoretical form of

For the first time, physicists have demonstrated that a universe like ours with three spatial dimensions could actually host a naked singularity – an event so intense, the laws of physics would fall apart. Until now, researchers have only been able to place naked singularities in five-dimensional universes, but by proving that they could theoretically

Three years after construction started, the most sensitive dark matter detector ever built has served up its first set of results – and it’s working just as its makers intended. The XENON1T machine, which we first reported on back in 2015, is our best shot yet at finding the notoriously elusive dark matter, which physicists

Researchers have created the strongest organic acid ever – and the team thinks it could revolutionise how we analyse proteins. The strongest acid on record is fluoroantimonic acid – it’s known as a superacid, meaning it has an acidity greater than completely pure sulphuric acid.   To give you an indication of how potent that is,

Researchers have constructed the world’s thinnest metallic nanowire, creating a stable string of the chemical element tellurium, that measures just one atom thick. The team behind the nanowire says the material is the most precisely configured ‘one-dimensional‘ system yet, and the technique used to produce the one-atom-thick atomic chain could lead to new advances in

Of the many ‘white whales’ that theoretical physicists are pursuing, the elusive magnetic monopole – a magnetic with only one pole – is one of the most confounding. Compared to the Higgs boson in terms of its potential impact on modern physics, the magnetic monopole has been on scientists’ minds for even longer. And now

The first direct detection of gravitational waves, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, was reported by scientists in 2016. Armed with this “discovery of the century”, physicists around the world have been planning new and better detectors of gravitational waves.   Physicist Professor Chunnong Zhao and his recent PhD students Haixing

If you live in the US, you’re probably used to talking about weight in pounds and ounces (and having to convert things when Australians like us start talking in kilograms and grams), but here’s the thing – all your measurements are actually based on one very metric standard: the international kilogram. Veritasium host Derek Muller

Scientists have shown for the first time that changes in entropy – the measure of disorder in a system – can accurately predict when a mysterious quantum flip, known as a quantum phase transition, is about to happen. That’s a big deal, because not only do we know very little about these quantum phase transitions

Despite the NSA confirming the existence of Skynet, we all should be grateful that technology has not yet advanced to the stage where a liquid metal T-1000 terminator can shape-shift its way into your home and demand to see John Connor.  But scientists in China are making a solid effort make a less sinister version

For the first time ever, physicists have managed to directly detect a hydrogen bond within a single molecule – meaning we can now observe the smallest and most abundant element in the Universe in ways that scientists could only ever theorise about. The experiment also reveals just how sensitive our imaging devices have become –

It’s very early days, but two papers published today have detected hints of elusive dark matter within data collected at the International Space Station (ISS). Dark matter is the hypothetical substance that makes up 26.8 percent of the known Universe, and explains why our Universe holds together. For decades, scientists have struggled to detect it,

Physicists at CERN have reported an unexplained phenomenon in their giant ion collider device – for the first time ever, particles called ‘strange hadrons’ have been observed in rare proton collisions. These strange hadrons aren’t new – we find them in quark-gluon plasma, which is the incredibly hot and dense state of matter thought to

For centuries, people have puzzled over how our Universe began. But the heat just got turned way up on a debate that’s quietly been raging between cosmologists, with 33 of the world’s most famous physicists publishing a letter angrily defending one of the leading hypotheses we have for the origin of the Universe. The letter is in response

For the first time, scientists have subjected quantum entanglement to extreme levels of acceleration, and there’s nothing fragile about this “spooky action at a distance”– it’s way more robust than we thought. In recent experiments, entangled particles held firm even while being accelerated to 30g – 30 times Earth’s acceleration – and the results could

The world’s most accurate timekeepers have brought their powers to bear on the next leap in quantum research – moving from quantum control of single atoms to entire molecules. This step up in manipulating something more complex than atoms could offer new options in how we might store or convert quantum information, or even allow

Don’t let the fact that the objects known as Prince Rupert’s drops are made out of glass fool you – the pretty, tear-drop shaped baubles can withstand some pretty harsh punishment. Until you gently snap their tail, at least. New research has literally shed a light on the drops’ odd balance of incredible strength and

Quantum communication is a strange beast, but one of the weirdest proposed forms of it is called counterfactual communication – a type of quantum communication where no particles travel between two recipients. Theoretical physicists have long proposed that such a form of communication would be possible, but now, for the first time, researchers have been

If we want to find extra dimensions lurking within our Universe – something that string theory attempts to explain – gravitational waves could be our key to locating them, physicists suggest. This new hypothesis seeks to answer the long-standing mystery of why gravity appears to be weaker than the other fundamental forces in our Universe,

In case it wasn’t already awesome enough, physicists have found a new way to turn ‘wonder material’ graphene into a ridiculously powerful superconductor, capable of shuttling electricity with zero resistance. Graphene is already an overachiever – just one atom thick, it’s stronger than steel, harder than diamond, and incredibly flexible. And last year, it became

In one of his videos from earlier this year, YouTuber Joe Scott, host of “Answers With Joe,” takes on the glaring question of the speed of light. In a vacuum, the speed of light is 299,792 kilometres per second (186,000 miles/second). That seems really fast in terms of speed as we know it here on

Everyone likes a shortcut and a quick trip somewhere cool, which means that everyone loves a wormhole – at least in theory. In actuality, these space-time tunnels are probably not the alleged intergalactic shortcuts we’re looking for – and this isn’t a mind trick from Obi-Wan, either. But first, let’s talk about what wormholes are

For months now, there’s been speculation that researchers might have finally created time crystals – strange crystals that have an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, putting them in constant oscillation without energy.   Now it’s official – researchers have just reported in detail how to make and measure these