Related topics: nanoparticles

From black holes to helium

A team of scientists has discovered that a law controlling the bizarre behavior of black holes out in space—is also true for cold helium atoms that can be studied in laboratories.

Belgium creates garbage highway for flood victims' waste

In eastern Belgium, an abandoned highway is almost completely buried under kilometres of piled-up rubbish: crushed refrigerators, splintered furniture, torn curtains, twisted metal, stuffed toys, defunct electronics and shards ...

Generating electricity from vibrations in road surface works

A pilot research project into vibration energy on the N34 provincial motorway near Hardenberg in the eastern Netherlands has shown that vibration energy as a local energy source is a sustainable alternative for the batteries ...

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Surface area

Surface area is the measure of how much exposed area a solid object has, expressed in square units. Mathematical description of the surface area is considerably more involved then the definition of arc length of a curve. For polyhedra (objects with flat polygonal faces) the surface area is the sum of the areas of its faces. Smooth surfaces, such as a sphere, are assigned surface area using their representation as parametric surfaces. This definition of the surface area is based on methods of infinitesimal calculus and involves partial derivatives and double integration.

General definition of surface area was sought by Henri Lebesgue and Hermann Minkowski at the turn of the twentieth century. Their work led to the development of geometric measure theory which studies various notions of surface area for irregular objects of any dimension. An important example is the Minkowski content of a surface.

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