If you bottle up a gas and try to image its atoms using today's most powerful microscopes, you will see little more than a shadowy blur. Atoms zip around at lightning speeds and are difficult to pin down at ambient temperatures.
Quantum Physics
Sep 15, 2016
1
4814
On December 26, 2015 at 03:38:53 UTC, scientists observed gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—for the second time.
Astronomy
Jun 15, 2016
211
4669
Unseen areas are troublesome for police and first responders: Rooms can harbor dangerous gunmen, while collapsed buildings can conceal survivors. Now Bounce Imaging, founded by an MIT alumnus, is giving officers and rescuers ...
Engineering
Jun 26, 2015
0
139
A team of researchers at MIT has designed one of the strongest lightweight materials known, by compressing and fusing flakes of graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon. The new material, a sponge-like configuration with ...
Nanomaterials
Jan 6, 2017
12
3484
The notion that some computational problems in math and computer science can be hard should come as no surprise. There is, in fact, an entire class of problems deemed impossible to solve algorithmically. Just below this class ...
Mathematics
Jan 10, 2022
1
781
After a two-year hiatus, the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, began its second run of experiments in June, smashing together subatomic particles at 13 teraelectronvolts ...
General Physics
Oct 14, 2015
9
4157
The electron is the basic unit of electricity, as it carries a single negative charge. This is what we're taught in high school physics, and it is overwhelmingly the case in most materials in nature.
Quantum Physics
Feb 21, 2024
9
4581
There may be more than a quadrillion tons of diamond hidden in the Earth's interior, according to a new study from MIT and other universities. But the new results are unlikely to set off a diamond rush. The scientists estimate ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 16, 2018
14
1367
As a grape slowly dries and shrivels, its surface creases, ultimately taking on the wrinkled form of a raisin. Similar patterns can be found on the surfaces of other dried materials, as well as in human fingerprints. While ...
Mathematics
Feb 2, 2015
6
4185
The Sahara desert is one of the harshest, most inhospitable places on the planet, covering much of North Africa in some 3.6 million square miles of rock and windswept dunes. But it wasn't always so desolate and parched. Primitive ...
Earth Sciences
Jan 2, 2019
28
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