Key to winning a cricket match is tricking the other team’s batters—no small feat, as bowlers bowl cricket balls nearly 100 miles per hour. In recent years, a bowling technique that has become popular involves keeping the arm almost entirely horizontal during delivery, notably used by Sri Lankan stars Lasith Malinga and Matheesha Pathirana. The aerodynamics of such deliveries have perplexed sports physicists.
The novel physics of biomolecular condensates could explain how these droplets help cells do their jobs.
Theories of computation and theories of the brain have close historical interrelations, the best-known examples being Turing’s introspective use of the brain’s operation as a model for his idealized computing machine (Turing 1936), McCulloch’s and Pitts’ use of ideal switching elements to model the brain (McCulloch and Pitts 1943), and von Neumann’s comparison of the logic and physics of both brains and computers (von Neumann 1958).
A team of applied physicists at Columbia University, working with a colleague from Henry M. Gunn High School, and another from the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that using corrugated siding on outdoor building walls can passively reduce wall temperatures.
In their paper published in the journal Nexus, the group describes how they added corrugated siding to a small test building and found that doing so lowered the wall temperatures.
Prior research has shown that covering the tops of buildings with radiative cooling materials can reduce the amount of heat that makes its way inside by up to 20%. This is because they are made in such a way as to reflect sunlight and radiate heat into outer space.
Something seems to be missing from the universe, and the favored model of physics calls it “dark matter” – but despite a century of searching, it remains a no-show. A new paper proposes an alternative hypothesis, showing how gravity could exist without mass and produce many of the same effects we ascribe to dark matter.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity is still our best model for describing gravity. As you might remember from high school physics class, gravity is the force that arises from masses resting on the fabric of spacetime. The more mass an object has, the deeper the “dip” in spacetime and the stronger the gravitational pull.
But starting in the 1930s, some strange astronomical observations began to raise questions. Galaxy clusters seemed to be moving much too fast to stay stable based on visible matter, suggesting that far more matter was present than we could see. That led to the hypothesis that huge amounts of invisible stuff – which was dubbed dark matter – pervaded the universe. The idea has held surprisingly strong in observations in the decades since, backed up by the motions of stars within galaxies and the bending and magnifying of light through gravitational lenses.
A recent study reveals new insights into aurorae across Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, highlighting the role of magnetic fields and solar winds in shaping these phenomena, with significant implications for space weather forecasting and planetary exploration.
The breathtaking aurorae, commonly known as the Northern and Southern Lights, have captivated human imagination for centuries. From May 10th to 12th, 2024, the most powerful aurora event in 21 years showcased the extraordinary beauty of these celestial light displays.
Recently, space physicists from the Department of Earth Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), including Professor Binzheng Zhang, Professor Zhonghua Yao, and Dr Junjie Chen, along with their international collaborators, have published a paper in Nature Astronomy that explores the fundamental laws governing the diverse aurorae observed across planets, such as Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. This work provides new insights into the interactions between planetary magnetic fields and solar wind, updating the textbook picture of giant planetary magnetospheres. Their findings can improve space weather forecasting, guide future planetary exploration, and inspire further comparative studies of magnetospheric environments.
Researchers achieve advances in periodic oscillations and transportation for optical pulses, with potential for next-gen optical communications and signal processing.
Researchers have achieved significant advances in wave physics by conducting experiments on Super-Bloch Oscillations (SBOs), which demonstrate the potential for manipulating optical pulses. By applying both DC and nearly detuned AC electric fields, they not only observed SBO collapse for the first time but also extended these oscillations to arbitrary wave driving situations, paving the way for innovative optical communication technologies.
Wave Physics and Super-Bloch Oscillations.
