Everyone has seen lightning and marveled at its power. But despite its frequency—about 8.6 million lightning strikes occur worldwide every day—why lightning proceeds in a series of steps from the thundercloud to the earth ...
The chances of being struck by lightning are less than one in a million, but those odds shortened considerably this month when more than 4.2 million lightning strikes were recorded in every Australian state and territory ...
A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences working with a colleague from ShanghaiTech University and another from Zhangjiang Laboratory, has developed a new way to make a laser with light in a wide range of ...
As our world modernizes faster than ever before, there is an ever-growing need for better and faster electronics and computers. Spintronics is a new system which uses the spin of an electron, in addition to the charge state, ...
If you've ever tried to carry on a conversation in a noisy room, you'll be able to relate to the scientists and engineers trying to "hear" the signals from experimental quantum computing devices called qubits. These basic ...
When you make conducting wires thinner, their electrical resistance goes up. This is Ohm's law, and it is generally right. An important exception is at very low temperatures, where the mobility of electrons increases when ...
Sitting a mile below ground in an abandoned gold mine in South Dakota is a gigantic cylinder holding 10 tons of purified liquid xenon closely watched by more than 250 scientists around the world. That tank of xenon is the ...
Whether looking out into space or peering deep into the microscopic realm, there is always more to see. In the case of solids, there is a world of atoms and particles teeming with activity that ultimately leads to useful ...
A new device has been fabricated that can demonstrate the quantum anomalous Hall effect, in which tiny, discrete voltage steps are generated by an external magnetic field. This work may enable extremely low-power electronics, ...
Ten high school teachers spent a week at MIT in July designing and making Frankensteel, a self-healing material inspired by the villain in the Terminator 2 movie. Next up: they aim to recreate the calculations and experiments ...
