How much is a kilogram? 1,000 grams. 2.20462 pounds. Or 0.0685 slugs based on the old Imperial gravitational system. But where does this amount actually come from and how can everyone be sure they are using the same measurement? Since 1889, countries who are members of the General Conference on Weights and Measures have agreed … Read more
We manufacture over 300m tonnes of plastics each year for use in everything from packaging to clothing. Their resilience is great when you want a product to last. But once discarded, plastics linger in the environment, littering streets, fields and oceans alike. Every corner of our planet has been blighted by our addiction to plastic. … Read more
Anyone looking for a bright side in the climate crisis may want to learn about a potentially revolutionary research project that could help redefine energy as we know it. Researchers are gathering at a meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics in Portland, Oregon, this week to deliver a kind of state-of-the-science … Read more
A team of astronomers has found strong indications of a cold super-Earth orbiting Barnard’s Star, the second closest star system to our sun. The discovery provides greater evidence for rocky worlds in our galaxy. It seems like the Super-Earth is Frozen. The frozen world is at least 3.2 times the mass of Earth and is … Read more
The ocean covers more than 70% of the surface of our the Earth. If somehow we harness the Power of Oceans to fight the World from Climate Change then it will be a big success. Well, International scientists have issued an ambitious 13-point plan for fighting global warming by focusing on ocean-based solutions. So let’s … Read more
The concept of time as a way to measure the duration of events is not only deeply intuitive, it also plays an important role in our mathematical descriptions of physical systems. For instance, we define an object’s speed as its displacement per a given time. But some researchers theorize that this Newtonian idea of time … Read more
If extra dimensions were large enough, a universe with different laws of physics could bubble up from the death of a black hole. That would be bad news for us: The new version would be uninhabitable. This could be the way the world ends. First, a pair of cosmic protons smashes together at unimaginable speeds. … Read more
The building blocks of life are literally raining down on Saturn’s atmosphere from its iconic rings. NASA’s dying Cassini spacecraft detected streams of organic molecules falling from the rings into the planet’s gassy outskirts, according to new research published in Science. The iconic planet’s “ring rain” is more like a ring downpour, and it’s coming … Read more
One of the biggest mysteries about our sun is why the corona, the upper part of the solar atmosphere is known, can be thousands of times hotter than the surface of the sun itself. It’s as though the air around a scorching, burning fireplace is hotter than the flames. While activity such as solar flares … Read more
Back in September 1859, a massive solar storm called the Carrington Event triggered a coronal mass ejection, which produced dazzling auroras in Earth’s atmosphere those were visible around the world. The atmospheric light show was so brilliant it reportedly woke gold miners in the Rocky Mountains. The electric surge caused by the solar storm disrupted … Read more
A plan to create the world’s largest marine sanctuary in Antarctic waters was shot down when a key conservation summit failed to reach a consensus, with environmentalists on Saturday, 3rd November 2018 decrying a lack of scientific foresight. Member states of the organisation tasked with overseeing the sustainable exploitation of the Southern Ocean failed at … Read more
In a step forward for information security for the Internet of Things, a team of researchers has published a new paper in the online edition of Nano Letters in which they have engineered a new type of physically unclonable function (PUF) based on interfacial magnetic anisotropy energy (IAE). This PUF utilizes the random distribution of … Read more
Using solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (ssNMR) techniques, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory discovered a new quantum criticality in a superconducting material, leading to a greater understanding of the link between magnetism and unconventional superconductivity. Most iron-arsenide superconductors display both magnetic and structural (or nematic) transitions, making it difficult to understand the … Read more
Some 10 billion years ago, the Milky Way merged with a large galaxy. The stars from this partner, named Gaia-Enceladus, make up most of the Milky Way’s halo and also shaped its thick disk, giving it its inflated form. A description of this mega-merger, discovered by an international team led by University of Groningen astronomer … Read more
Now researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), a DOE Energy Innovation Hub, have come up with a new recipe for renewable fuels that could bypass the limitations in current materials. An artificial photosynthesis device called a “hybrid photoelectrochemical and voltaic (HPEV) cell” … Read more