# View All Physics in Action

#### How Batteries Work

From turning on a lamp in your home to running solar panels, batteries play a large role in our everyday lives.

#### Imaging a Black Hole

The black hole selected for imaging resides in the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light years away (324 quintillion miles away).

#### Is There Need for a New Particle Physics Model?

High energy particle physics experiments in recent past have brought into question parts of the model currently used in particle physics.

#### TESS: A Satellite Scout for Nearby Exoplanets

New worlds orbiting strange stars are waiting to be discovered...and we're on the hunt.

#### Meet the Tiny Machines that Harness Humidity for Power

What could we accomplish with machines that draw power from the air around us?

#### Shields Up: What's Holding Up Human Travel to Mars?

Getting humans to Mars safely means figuring out how to protect the body from the damage of cosmic rays.

#### Micius and the Journey of Spaceborne Entangled Photons

China's Micius satellite is pioneering the use of quantum entanglement in communications.

#### A Black Hole Born Sans a Supernova?

A supergiant star's mysterious disappearing act has scientists questioning the standard theories of black hole formation.

Elon Musk's newest venture seeks to unite machines and human minds.

#### A New Method for Reducing Quantum Uncertainty

Scientists have found a way around one aspect of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

#### Imaging Forests for Environmental Assessments

Airborne spectroscopy allows scientists to collect data on forests at an unprecedented rate.

#### Neutron Stars: Cosmic Laboratories for Quantum Physics

Using light from a distant neutron star, scientists have observed a strange quantum phenomenon called vacuum birefringence.

#### Molecular Machinery Snags 2016 Nobel in Chemistry

A machine the size of a single molecule? This year's Nobel prize in chemistry went to the people who made it possible!

#### Dressed to Impress: Attraction Between Electrons

By "dressing" the potential of electrons, researchers have taken what may be a big step toward room-temperature superconductivity!

#### Hitomi, An Ambitious Endeavor Cut Short

Japan's Hitomi X-ray Observatory was lost in an accident just a month after launch. What did we learn in that month?

Electrostatics help "bug bot" micro-drones cling to surfaces just like their biological counterparts!

#### Quantum Computing, Human Processing

Gamers are helping engineer the next generation of supercomputers—and you can, too!

#### Using Gold Nanoparticles to Kill Cancer

Lasers and nanoengineering team up to take on one of the deadliest diseases

#### FAST: Earthquake Analysis

A new software algorithm promises fast, sensitive detection of small seismic events

#### Nobel Neutrinos

Learn about 2015's Physics Nobel Prize winner!

#### Wireless Neural Implants

Radiofrequency electromagnetic waves can power brain implants in mice

#### Plasma Fairies: Femtosecond Laser Holograms

Lasers have enabled the creation of free-floating, interactive holograms!

#### Color-Tunable Elastic Fibers

By mimicking the structure of organisms like the Pollia condensata berry, researchers have invented an elastic fiber that changes color when stretched!

#### Ultrafast Aluminum Battery

It’s flexible, fast, nontoxic, doesn’t catch on fire, and its materials are inexpensive.

#### Wave-Particle Duality in One Image

The principle of complementarity remains upheld.

#### Deciphering Vesuvius Scrolls with "X-ray" Vision

Uncovering ancient, charred texts with physics.

#### Passively Cool: A Departure from A/C

A potential low-energy alternative to air conditioning.

#### Measuring Drought with GPS

Tracking how strongly water pushes on the Earth's crust.

#### Curiosity vs. Other Mars Missions

How do recent Mars missions compare to the popular Curiosity rover?

#### Electrifying Tesla Coil Music and Fashion

Creating art with stunning electric arcs

#### Holograms: From Credit Cards to Chocolate

Holograms' uses range from practical to purely aesthetic.

#### Memory, Thermodynamics, and Time

New strides in explaining the arrow of time

#### The Dawn of the Tetraquark

A new particle discovery requires some rethinking in particle physics

#### Possible First Detection of Elusive Gravitational Waves Explained

One of the biggest discoveries in decades.

#### In Depth: Fusion Strides at NIF

How scientists recently pushed closer to sustainable fusion

#### Whirling Skirts Reveal Steady Patterns

An unexpected application of the Coriolis effect

#### Glowing Carpets: Rolling Out in 2014

Pragmatic and beautiful light transmissive carpets

#### Pluto's Neighbor Could Float on Water

A Kuiper Belt object less dense than water has piqued scientists' interest

#### Ancient Chalice Inspires New Physics

The Lycurgus Cup's optical mysteries inspire scientists

#### Atomic Friction

New research reveals the frictional nuances on the atomic scale

#### Element 115 and the Island of Stability

Ununpentium, the 115th element, has been confirmed

#### A Spin on Doppler

A twist on this physics principle can detect rotation in tornadoes, planets and more

#### Tiny Particle Accelerators

These powerful particle accelerators can fit on a desk

#### Neurons and Nuclear Tests

Nuclear bomb tests have opened doors in neuroscience

#### The Monkey and the Hunter

Test your knowledge of gravity with this thought experiment.

#### "Breathprint" Identification

Scientists can now identify people by their breath — just like a fingerprint

#### Cloaking Earthquakes

Scientists aim to "hide" buildings from seismic waves

#### The Cyborg Scientist

Blurring the lines between man and machine with electronic implants

#### "Living" Crystal Colonies

These inanimate crystals form colonies under UV-light, like bacteria

#### Below Absolute Zero: Negative Temperatures Explained

What does it mean?

#### Shattering Science and Glass Physics

Scientists try to strike a balance with glass

#### Bullet Proof: Absorbing Micro-Bullets

Bullet-proof material absorbs bullets and reseals itself

#### Mixing Physics: Rayleigh-Taylor Instabilities

Fluid dynamics behind beautiful video of mixing patterns

#### Could This Be the Next Robotic Skin?

Ladybug hairs inspire sensitive, flexible electronic sensors

#### There and Back Again: An Asteroid's Tale

Scientists analyze asteroid dust retrieved by spacecraft

#### Silencing with the Speech Jammer

Time-delayed voice recordings render you silent

#### Charging Ahead: The Future of Battery Technology

Measuring charge in electric vehicles

#### Router Vision

With an adapted wireless router, you can see moving objects through walls

#### Wirelessly Charged Electric Buses

A new bus route will feature electric buses that wirelessly charge while waiting for passengers.

#### The Golden Age of Gold

During the Olympic Games, gold takes center stage. Gold was chosen for first place awards because it symbolized the Golden Age of Mankind in Greek mythology. According to Greek mythology, the Golden Age ended long ago for mankind, but new research on gold indicates that we may now be in the "Golden Age of Gold."

#### Laser Speckle Patterns and Malaria

Of the five different parasites that cause malaria, one type can cause death within hours. Current methods of detecting malaria take between 8 and 10 hours. A new technique, developed by an international group, analyzes the speckle patterns of laser light reflected off of a blood sample with detection times of 30 minutes.

#### Quantum Dots and Cells

Quantum dots can be used to stimulate cells, to probe them, and to trigger neuron firing with light!

#### High-tech road science: Where nano meets pavement

New developments in asphalt pavement could dramatically reduce fuel consumption, environmental pollution, and the frequency and cost of maintenance.

#### Surviving a Plunge From Space

Spacesuits are being developed to allow humans to survive a fall from thousands of feet in the sky.

#### The cup-in-hand walk

Have you ever done the cup-in-hand walk, and spilled your drink? It's a common event. The Krechetnikov Fluid Physics Lab at the University of California Santa Barbara usually doesn't focus on this type of problem, but after seeing enough people spilling, they decided to look into it!

#### Monitoring the Brain with Flexible Electronics

A new brain sensor developed by a team of researchers could represent a significant improvement in the ability to detect exactly where abnormal brain activity starts.

#### Super Efficient LEDs

More than 100% efficient, these Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) put out more light energy than the electrical energy that they use!

#### Crash Reconstruction Physics

Few physics experiments come with greater consequences than those done by a police crash reconstruction team.

#### Ultralight Lattices

Strong, springy, and ultralight, these lattices can sit atop a dandelion in seed without damaging it, and carry about 1000 times its weight without being damaged!

#### The Big and Small of Rockets

From the acidic digestive fluid in your stomach to the dry, cratered surface of Mars, rockets could soon make it possible to explore extreme environments as never before.

#### Magnets: Where Physics Meets High Fashion

Physics enthusiasts aren't always the people you turn to for advice on the latest fashion trends, but it's impossible not to give physics at least partial credit for the recent nail craze--magnetic nail polish.

#### Entangled Diamonds

Quantum entanglement has been called “spooky action at a distance” by Einstein and has often been called spooky or weird since then. Recently two diamonds, big enough to see with your eye, were observed to have entangled quantum mechanical states.

#### Migration via quantum mechanics

A perplexing property of quantum mechanics could be allowing birds to see and navigate the planet’s magnetic fields

#### Nano Cupcakes

For a while carbon nanotubes have been a hot topic in science. Some of the latest research on nanotubes done at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, CO are fondly called Cupcakes,1,2 but you may only want a mental bite of these!

#### Cleaning with Sound

Sound may not be a normal cleaning product in your house, but it is just the thing for cleaning delicate jewelry, surgical instruments, lenses, and many other small, intricate objects. Soon, it could also make cleaning big objects like houses or machines much more efficient.

#### Galactic Cannibalism

The Andromeda Galaxy, is one of the most distant objects that can be seen with the naked eye and it's on a collision course with our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

#### 3D Printers & Fabbers

If you can dream it, you can print it! Learn how these 3D printers are changing the invention process.

#### Graphene Printing Press

It's been a year since Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their breakthroughs with graphene. What is graphene up to now?

#### Spraying on Energy Efficiency

In the next few years you might be able to buy a spray that could dramatically increase the energy efficiency of your house.

#### Diamond planets are a girl’s best friend

What's better than a diamond engagement ring? An entire planet made of diamonds!

#### Electronic Tattoos

Electronic sensors are used to gather all sorts of information. Perhaps you’ve seen some fitness monitors that look like arm bands, chest bands, or watches. There are brain monitors, some look like a swim cap with wires coming out. Mindball (a game using your brain waves) just has a single band you put around your head. Now imagine an electronic sensor that is wireless, flexible, and as inconspicuous as a temporary tattoo!

#### A Mirror Built for Space

How do you design a mirror with a diameter of 6.5 meters that can survive a rocket launch into space, orbit the Earth at a radius of about one million miles for 5-10 years, and hold its shape at temperatures near -220˚C? And why would you want to?

#### Mind over matter, light over mind

Can lasers control your mind? Not exactly, but light can control the firing of neurons in the brain, and has been used to affect the behavior of mice.

#### Tubular Peas

Nanotubes, discovered in 1991, are a new form of carbon. With four electrons available for bonding, the carbon atom can combine with others in a number ways and produce many useful materials.

#### Neutrino Astrophysics

Very large stars can end their lives in a cataclysmic explosion called a supernova. The photographs show a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located only about 160,000 light years away.

The neutrino is a ghostly particle that leaves hardly a trace of its passing. Most neutrinos go right through Earth without any deviation or interaction, and trillions harmlessly pierce your body each second.

#### Space Weather

How's the space weather today? Quiet enough for a safe trip to the moon? Quiet enough to operate your GPS navigation system accurately? So active that it would crash your power grid? Like our everyday weather, space weather can change suddenly, become violent, and interfere with our lives.

#### Old as the M4 Planet

In the universe, we may or may not be alone, but at least there seem to be plenty of planets. Over the last decade, extra-solar planet-finding has become a growth industry, with some 100 already identified by their effect on the motion of their central star.

#### Hubble Goes Deep

As residents of the Milky Way galaxy, we live in a huge spiral system of about 10 11 stars.

#### Far Out Planets

Are we alone in the universe? To begin to answer this question, we could first ask if Earth is unique in the universe.

#### Fluids in Space

We have all seen images, such as the one at the right, of astronauts floating inside a spacecraft. If these astronauts used a spring scale to weigh themselves, they would detect no weight at all. Does no weight mean no gravity?

#### GRACE Under Fire

Remote and beautiful, Antarctica is covered by an ice sheet averaging several kilometers in thickness that locks up some 70% of Earth’s fresh water—if it all melted, the oceans would rise about 70 meters.

#### Fusion Machines

In 1951, the astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer devised a way to contain a hot plasma—an ionized gas—with the hope of producing a sustained fusion reaction that could lead to electric power generation.

#### Matters of State

We know about solids, liquids, gases, and plasmas —these are the well-known states of matter. But now there’s another, called the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), and it’s been predicted for a long time.

#### Plasma Power

Everyday objects can be classified into solids, liquids, and gases. However, the matter in a lightning bolt, a flame, and the Aurora Borealis are something quite different.

#### Energetic Degenerates

If systems "seek" the lowest possible energy, why don't atomic electrons all cascade down into the ground state?

#### The Theory of Everything... Everything Alive!

Physicists like to explain a broad range of phenomena with a few simple mathematical laws.

#### Ice Ages

In the controversy over global warming, some people have suggested that human-induced warming might be a good thing if it kept us out of the next Ice Age.

#### The Little Constant that Couldn't?

Physicists measure the values of basic quantities like the speed of light and the charge of the electron. Cosmologists use the results in studies of the origin of the universe, some 12 billion years ago, and they assume the numbers have not changed over this time.

#### Catch a Cosmic Microwave

A trio of recent findings on cosmic microwave background radiation lends strong support to the idea that the entire observable universe was once smaller than an atom and underwent a "super-charged" Big Bang.

#### Deep Impact

Comets are relics from the origin of the solar system, carrying material about 4.5 billion years old.

#### CT Scans

William Roentgen made the first x-ray image in 1895, but the technology remained essentially the same until the late 1960s. These images were projected onto flat detectors, such as film or electronic sensors.

#### Catch an Earthquake

San Francisco and Los Angeles, home to about 7.5 million people and to much of the economy of California, lie close to the infamous San Andreas fault.

#### Waving Back

Of the forces in nature, gravity is by far the weakest.

#### What the WMAP!

Cosmology is one of the great success stories of contemporary physics. A few investigators began theorizing about the history of the universe in the 1940s, but there was precious little observational evidence to work with.

#### Big 'G'

In 1665, Isaac Newton recognized that all matter attracts all other matter, but he also recognized that the gravitational attraction of everyday objects for each other was far too small to be measured in his time.

#### Gravitational Waves

In our everyday world, we observe all sorts of waves, including sound waves, water waves, and radio waves. But what about gravitational waves?

#### Black Holes

A star exists in a delicate balance between the crushing force of gravity, on the one hand, and the push of incredibly hot gases on the other.

#### Building at the Nanoscale

The thickness of a human hair is about 200 microns, 20 times the length of this guitar.

Matter and Antimatter: the cloud chamber track of an electron-positron pair

#### Antihydrogen Antics

As StarTrek fans know well, the fuel for warp drive is antimatter.

#### Water Tubes

Physicists have created a new form of water, one that stays liquid at hundreds of degrees C below zero.

#### MRI Magic

Medical x-rays provide images of the body but utilize radiation that in large doses can damage cells. A completely different technology, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), emerged in the late 1970s.

#### Seeing Atoms

What does it mean to see an atom? Suppose you tried to use the world’s strongest optical microscope to see an atom. What would happen?

#### Ferrofluid Fun

Have you ever seen a liquid magnet? If magnetic material is ground into an extremely fine powder, with a particle size of about 10 nanometers, and suspended in a liquid, the resulting magnetic suspension is called a ferrofluid.

#### Natural Reactors

The first controlled nuclear reactor, built during World War II, was a great achievement, but it was not the first reactor to operate on planet Earth.

#### Solar Flares

You may have seen the “northern lights” in the fall of 2003, even if you live as far south as Texas or Italy.

#### Sound, Lights, Action!

Sonoluminescence is a way to turn sound energy into light. When intense sound waves are created in a flask of water, a tiny air bubble in the water can give off flashes of light.

#### Chaos Rules

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Newtonian mechanics was triumphant in its explanation of the solar system.

#### Blowin' in the Wind

After crossing Florida, Hurricane Katrina headed into the Gulf of Mexico early on August 26, 2005 as a Category One hurricane.

#### Nuclei Knockdown

At RHIC--the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York--gold nuclei traveling at nearly the speed of light smash into each other, destroying themselves and producing a spray of other particles.

#### You are My Shining Star

To a star, size matters. The more massive the star, the higher the pressure and temperature in its core, the brighter it shines, and the sooner it exhausts the hydrogen fuel supply for its fusion reactions.

#### Laser Cooling and Trapping

Absolute zero, as cold as it gets, resides at the very bottom of the temperature scale.

#### An Especially Elegant Universe

Joe McMaster, producer, director, and writer of Nova's The Elegant Universe, is not a physicist. Fortunately, he had the patient help of the show's star and narrator, physicist Brian Greene, as he put together the PBS production delving into String Theory.

#### Saturn's Rings

Saturn’s rings have posed a big challenge ever since Galileo first laid eyes on them in 1610 through his 20-power telescope.

#### Giant Magnetoresistance

Nobel-prize-winning research led to the MP3 player and HDTV-on-demand.

#### Do You See What Eye See?

It’s been hard to miss the publicity for LASIK, the laser surgery that reshapes the cornea to improve the eye’s ability to focus.

#### Granular Materials

In our everyday world, matter is usually classified into solids, liquids, and gases. But what about dry sand?

#### AMANDA, Light of my Ice...

An underwater telescope called AMANDA, frozen deep in Antarctic ice, peers down at ghostly neutrinos that pass through Earth from above the Northern Hemisphere.