If you live in the US and missed the last total solar eclipse in 2017, good news! You’re about to get another chance. There will be a total solar eclipse passing through Texas and the Midwest states on April 8. Remember that in a solar eclipse, the moon’s shadow falls on the Earth. If you’re … Read more
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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a phenomenal game, praised for being able to improve and iterate upon Breath of the Wild. In the weeks after the game’s release, it was written up with all sorts of breathless praise as people wondered how Nintendo managed to make a game that seemed to … Read more
Wouldn’t it be cool if you never had to charge your cell phone? I’m sure that’s what a lot of people were thinking recently, when a company called BetaVolt said it had developed a coin-sized “nuclear battery” that would last for 50 years. Is it for real? Yes it is. Will you be able to … Read more
But there may be opportunities to indirectly spot the signatures of those gravitons. One strategy Vafa and his collaborators are pursuing draws on large-scale cosmological surveys that chart the distribution of galaxies and matter. In those distributions, there might be “small differences in clustering behavior,” Obied said, that would signal the presence of dark gravitons. … Read more
But the solar system contains more than two masses. In fact, it started as a big cloud of dust without any planets and without the sun, and every speck of dust had an attractive interaction with every other speck. That’s a lot of complicated stuff going on, but there’s a trick we can use to … Read more
Illustration: Rhett Allain You can see that we have a right triangle with the hypotenuse equal to the distance from the observer’s eyes to the center of the Earth (R + h), with the other two sides being just R and the distance to the horizon (s). Using the Pythagorean theorem, we can solve for … Read more
“The very reason that we have magnetism in our everyday lives is because of the strength of electron exchange interactions,” said study coauthor Ataç İmamoğlu, a physicist also at the Institute for Quantum Electronics. However, as Nagaoka theorized in the 1960s, exchange interactions may not be the only way to make a material magnetic. Nagaoka … Read more
The rubber band example does indeed have two nodes—they are at the ends of the rubber band where your fingers hold it. We only have half a wavelength in the standing wave, but there is indeed a relationship between the length of the rubber band and the size of the wavelength. Guitar Strings It’s time … Read more
A few years ago, the researchers decided to put a superconducting metal called strontium ruthenate in their crosshairs. Its structure is similar to that of a mysterious class of copper-based “cuprate” superconductors, but it can be manufactured in a more pristine way. While the team didn’t learn the secrets of the cuprates, the material responded … Read more
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That was a surprise—and a possible indication that something crucial was missing in those models: magnetism. Stellar Symmetry Last year, Gang Li, an asteroseismologist now at KU Leuven, went digging through Kepler’s giants. He was searching for a mixed-mode signal that recorded the magnetic field in the core of a red giant. “Astonishingly, I actually found … Read more