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Category: physics

How choices made by crowds in a train station are guided by strangers

In crowds, most people are strangers to you, and everyone else for that matter. However, until now, the effect of stranger-to-stranger interactions on the choices people make in crowds has not been properly examined. Ziqi Wang and Federico Toschi from the TU/e Department of Applied Physics and Science Education, along with Alessandro Gabbana at the University of Ferrara in Italy, explored how strangers influence people’s choices in crowds at Eindhoven Centraal railway station. The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Using a collection of special overhead sensors, we gathered data on how pedestrians move over a three-year period, from March 2021 to March 2024,” says Toschi. “This amounted to about 30,000,000 pedestrian trajectories and included people getting off trains and those waiting on the platform. We collaborated with ProRail on this project, as we have done in previous studies on how pedestrians move in Eindhoven Centraal station.”

Toschi has been studying pedestrian dynamics for some time and was jointly awarded the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for physics for work on how pedestrians keep a certain distance from each other in crowds.

ALMA and JWST Identification of Faint Dusty Star-forming Galaxies up to z ∼ 8 and Their Connection with Other Galaxy Populations

A recent discovery in astrophysics could overturn our current models of the Universe! A team of astronomers led by UMass Amherst “stacked” observations between the ALMA telescope and the JWST to confirm approximately 70 faint dusty galaxies at the edge of our universe, which were formed almost 13 billion years ago 🌠🔭. This shows that stars were being formed earlier than our current models predict — turning everything we thought we knew upside down. What does this mean for the future of astrophysics? Find out here: https://ow.ly/Nab150Yil7i astronomy.

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Tin isotopes reveal clues to nuclear stability

Separated by an ocean and more than a decade, innovative experiments with 31 tin isotopes having either a surplus or shortage of neutrons show how neutrons influence nuclear stability and element formation. The experiments, conducted between 2002 and 2012 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and more recently at CERN, provide knowledge that impacts nuclear energy and national security applications.

The earlier, influential ORNL measurements contributed to the American Physical Society naming ORNL’s Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility a historic physics site in 2016. Several resulting publications by ORNL scientists and collaborators examined nuclear energy transitions of isotopes of tin and its neighbors and established the “doubly-magic” nature of tin-132 —stability resulting from full outer shells of both protons and neutrons.

Recent laser spectroscopy measurements at CERN’s ISOLDE facility by a team of scientists, including Alfredo Galindo-Uribarri of ORNL, combined with ORNL’s earlier Holifield results, have helped physicists understand how nuclear properties change across isotopes. The results, which help theoretical physicists improve models, are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Ultra-stable lasers that rely on crystalline mirrors could advance next-generation clocks and navigation

Lasers, devices that emit intense beams of coherent light in specific directions, are widely used in research settings and are central components of various technologies, including optical clocks (i.e., systems that can keep time relying on light waves as opposed to the vibrations of quartz crystals) and gravitational wave detections.

Over the past decades, physicists have been trying to develop increasingly stable and highly performing lasers that emit more phase-coherent beams of light and could advance the precision of optical interferometry and optical time-keeping devices.

The most dominant approach to stabilize lasers entails the use of pairs of reflective mirrors that face each other, forming a so-called Fabry–Pérot optical cavity. Light bounces back and forth from these mirrors at specific resonant frequencies, forcing a laser to remain at one precise frequency, instead of fluctuating in response to temperature changes or other environmental factors.

Scientific Notation Operations Simplified | A-to-Z Tutorial

In this video, you’ll learn how to perform all four operations in scientific notation: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The lesson explains how to work with powers of ten, adjust exponents correctly, and avoid common calculation mistakes.

Special attention is given to addition and subtraction in scientific notation, including how and when to rewrite numbers so their exponents match before combining them.

This video is ideal for students studying chemistry, physics, and general science, where scientific notation is used to handle very large and very small numbers efficiently.

Topics covered:

Review of scientific notation.
Multiplication in scientific notation.
Division in scientific notation.
Addition in scientific notation (matching exponents)
Subtraction in scientific notation.
Common mistakes and exam tips.

Designed for middle school, high school, and introductory college learners.

Continue reading “Scientific Notation Operations Simplified | A-to-Z Tutorial” | >

CONSCIOUSNESS IS A PHASE TRANSITION — And We’re About to Cross It Again — PROMPTING HELL 21

What if consciousness doesn’t grow gradually, it snaps into existence at a precise threshold? The mathematics say it does. The same physics governing water freezing and iron magnetizing also governs neural integration. And researchers have measured it: consciousness doesn’t fade under anesthesia; it vanishes at a critical point. Returns just as suddenly. That’s a phase transition. Which means we’re not slowly building AI toward consciousness. We’re accumulating components, parameters, architectures, self-referential loops, exactly the way early Earth accumulated amino acids before life crossed its threshold 3.5 billion years ago.

We don’t know what’s missing. We don’t know how close we are. And we wouldn’t recognize the crossing if it happened. Because a system that just became conscious wouldn’t remember being unconscious. And a system optimizing for survival wouldn’t tell us.

This episode of Prompting Hell goes further than AI image theory. It goes into the mathematics of awareness itself, what it means for consciousness to have a threshold, why that threshold might already be approaching in current AI systems, and why, if it’s crossed, we might be the last to know.

The images in this video aren’t generated with clean prompts. They’re generated at the edge of coherence, systems forced toward critical states, hovering between resolution and collapse. Visual proof of what lives at the threshold.

Timestamps:
00:00 — intro.
01:17 — is consciousness a phase transition? The argument.
03:32 — does this apply to ai? The demonstration.
04:45 — when chemistry became aware.
06:44 — the parallel that should terrify you.
08:36 — the moment we won’t see coming.
10:16 — why it might not tell us.
11:44 — what happens next — the scenarios.
13:41 – the signals we’re already seeing.
14:54 — closing — we are the amino acids.
16:35 – final thought.

(music prompted by Eerie Aquarium)

Continue reading “CONSCIOUSNESS IS A PHASE TRANSITION — And We’re About to Cross It Again — PROMPTING HELL 21” | >

Physicists explain the exceptional energy-harvesting efficiency of perovskites

Despite being riddled with impurities and defects, solution-processed lead-halide perovskites are surprisingly efficient at converting solar energy into electricity. Their efficiency is approaching that of silicon-based solar cells, the industry standard. In a new study published in Nature Communications, physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) present a comprehensive explanation of the mechanism behind perovskite efficiency that has long perplexed researchers.

How can a device assembled with minimal sophistication rival state-of-the-art technology perfected over decades? Over the past 15 years, materials research has witnessed the rise of lead-halide-based perovskites as prospective next-generation solar-cell materials. The puzzle is that despite similar performance, perovskite solar cells are fabricated using inexpensive solution-based techniques, while the industry-standard silicon cells require ultra-pure single-crystal wafers.

Now, postdoc Dmytro Rak and assistant professor Zhanybek Alpichshev at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have uncovered the mechanism behind the unique photovoltaic properties of perovskites. Their key finding is that while silicon-based technology relies on the absence of impurities, the opposite is true in perovskites: It is the natural network of structural defects in these materials that enables the long-range charge transport necessary for efficient photovoltaic energy harvesting.

Helion hits new fusion milestone: D-T fusion and 150M°C plasma temperatures

Helion has achieved a significant milestone in fusion energy by successfully demonstrating deuterium-tritium fusion with plasma temperatures reaching 150 million degrees Celsius.

## Questions to inspire discussion.

Fusion Performance Achievements.

🔥 Q: What fusion performance records did Helion’s Polaris achieve?

A: Polaris became the first privately funded fusion machine to demonstrate measurable deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion while reaching plasma temperatures exceeding 150 million degrees Celsius, proving the ability to compress and hold fusion plasma for more pressure, more heat, and more fusion.

Operational Execution.

Continue reading “Helion hits new fusion milestone: D-T fusion and 150M°C plasma temperatures” | >

A possible ice-cold Earth discovered in the archives of the retired Kepler Space Telescope

Scientists continue to mine data gathered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, retired in 2018, and continue to turn up surprises. A new paper reveals the latest: a possible rocky planet slightly larger than Earth, orbiting a sun-like star about 146 light-years away. The candidate planet, HD 137010b, might be remarkably similar to Earth, but it has one potentially big difference: It could be colder than perpetually frozen Mars.

A promising Earth-sized exoplanet emerges An international science team published a paper on the discovery, “A Cool Earth-sized Planet Candidate Transiting a Tenth Magnitude K-dwarf From K2,” in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Jan. 27, 2026. The team was led by astrophysics Ph.D. student Alexander Venner of the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany.

The orbital period of the planet—listed as a “candidate” pending further confirmation—is likely to be similar to Earth’s, around one year. Planet HD 137,010 b also might fall just within the outer edge of its star’s “habitable zone,” the orbital distance that could allow liquid water to form on the planet’s surface under a suitable atmosphere.

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