Physics

News

Angry Birds, Happy Physicists

12:00AM July 5, 2011 | Brian Crecente

Galileo discovered the language of nature. Einstein questioned the colour of rainbows. Today’s physicists ponder the vertical acceleration and horizontal velocity of an angry bird in flight. More »

In Real Life

Learn Physics The Angry Birds Way

8:20AM June 21, 2011 | Brian Crecente

I’m a bit of a physics hobbyist. That doesn’t mean that I understand or can even converse in the language of motion, but I love reading about it. More »

News

Has Fermilab Really Discovered An Entirely New Subatomic Particle?

5:40AM April 8, 2011 | Alasdair Wilkins

Yesterday, physicists announced the discovery of a strange anomaly, one that cannot easily be explained by our current understanding of particle physics. We examine what’s really going on here, and why we all may have missed the really exciting discovery. More »

News

Light-Absorbing Anti-Lasers Could One Day Rule Your Computer

6:00AM February 19, 2011 | Mike Fahey

Scientists at Yale University have created the world’s first anti-laser, a device in which two beams of light clash together, ultimately cancelling each other out. How could such a device change the way we do our computing? More »

In Real Life

It Took A Team Of Physicists All This Time To Figure Out How DVDs Work

1:33PM January 11, 2011 | Annalee Newitz

Though DVDs have been consumer-grade tech for years, it wasn’t until yesterday that scientists announced they were certain why they worked. Now we know that burning a DVD is really more like freezing it. More »

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These Are Some Of The Guys Who Made Red Dead Look So Good

6:30PM December 30, 2010 | Luke Plunkett

THE PHYSICS OF VIDEO GAMES from Dave Thomas on Vimeo.

Half the visual appeal of Red Dead Redemption is in the landscapes. Those were done by Rockstar. But the other half is John Marston’s swagger, or the way a bandit gets caught in his horse’s stirrups. More »

News

Large Hadron Collider Proves The Universe Was Once A Liquid

6:41AM November 27, 2010 | Alasdair Wilkins

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator smashed together lead nuclei at the highest energies possible, creating dense sub-atomic particles that reach temperatures of over ten trillion degrees. Beyond being awesome, this achievement shows the early universe was actually a liquid. More »

News

And Now We’re Trapping Antimatter Atoms

6:30AM November 18, 2010 | Mike Fahey

Antimatter and matter annihilate each other on contact, so how do you go about capturing atoms of antihydrogen for study? The brilliant minds at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva have figured it out. More »

News

A Space-Time Cloak Is Much More Exciting Than An Invisibility Cloak

6:30AM November 17, 2010 | Mike Fahey

Do you find the idea of an honest-to-goodness cloak of invisibility intriguing? How about a cloak that obscures events in space-time? Science is making it happen. More »

News

Convert Information Into Energy, Just Add Demon

4:30AM November 16, 2010 | Mike Fahey

Researchers in Tokyo have taken a physics law breaking thought experiment from an 18th century Scottish theoretical physicist and made it a reality, converting energy into information using Maxwell’s Demon. More »