Physics Buzz

It was a hundred years after the founding of this country, and only eleven years after the end of the civil war, that a man of African descent first earned a PhD from an American university. His name was Edward Bouchet, and he made history when he graduated from Yale with his PhD in physics in 1876. Despite being effectively locked out of academia and research at any institution that wasn’t specifically for people of color, Bouchet became a trailblazer and a role model, serving as an educator for most of his later life, a living example of what America was struggling to become in the post-reconstruction era: a place where merit and dedication are rewarded regardless of who you are.

What do a flock of starlings, solar flares, traffic jams, the event horizon of a black hole, and the human brain have in common?

How steep does an incline need to be before a box will slide on it? It's a classic question in physics classrooms, and the answer depends on two factors—the box's weight and a factor called μ (mu): the coefficient of friction . The value of μ depends on things like the box's material, the texture of the incline's surface, and whether the box is already moving or sitting still, but in some situations there's another surprising factor that can affect how easy it is for an object to start sliding along a surface—how long the object has been sitting still.

Instead of binge-watching one more episode of Game of Thrones or The Big Bang Theory , consider taking a few minutes to look at your cosmic neighborhood. You could be the one to discover a neighbor that has never been seen before—such as the alluring,  hypothetical Planet Nine .

The Histioteuthis heteropsis , also known as the cockeyed squid, spends its days drifting through the ocean, eyes on alert for signs of predators or prey. Squid are intriguing creatures in general, but it’s the eyes of Histioteuthis heteropsis that draw you in. Or, rather, the contrast between the eyes—a large, bulging, yellowish one on one side and the significantly smaller, more traditional looking eye on the other side.

A good pair of lenses can transform your life, assuming you are one of the 4.2 billion people in the world with less-than-perfect eyesight. A good lens can also transform our understanding of life and this world we inhabit. From the discovery of microorganisms to the moons of Jupiter, lenses shine a light on things too small or too faint to see with the naked eye. They also help us capture and preserve the milestones and everyday moments that make up a life. That’s a lot to ask of ground glass.

We all know that the human body has weaknesses. Whether the cause is genetic, environmental, personal choices, pure dumb luck, or some combination of factors, it’s not uncommon for diseases to take hold and destroy a body cell-by-cell. In the fight against these diseases, one of the most promising approaches involves using tiny nanoparticles to carry toxic drugs to precisely the right place: the infected cells.

Black holes are one of the best-known and most intriguing concepts in astrophysics. They're places where a literally unstoppable force— usually the domain of philosophers —manifests. They've given rise to countless thought experiments and what-ifs, provided a theoretical tool to probe the nature of our universe, and inspired generations of scientists and science enthusiasts alike to stretch their imaginations to the extreme...and beyond.

We're fast approaching what are usually the coldest, driest months of the year (at least here in the northern hemisphere), and with that comes the annoying tendency of doorknobs to shock and startle us whenever they're touched. It happens to some extent almost everywhere, but it wasn't until I spent a week at a conference in Montana—and found myself flinching every time I had to press the elevator button—that I really gave some thought to this usually-minor annoyance.

At this week’s American Physical Society Meeting in Washington, DC, researchers from an observatory in Mexico unveiled unique images featuring a kind of shadow of the moon and sun. The images don’t contain a lot of new information about the sun and moon, but are a way of studying charged particles known as cosmic rays that move at really high speeds—their properties, interactions with magnetic fields, and even a bit about where they come from.

The question might seem like nothing more than mental gymnastics, a thought-provoking but “out there” question meant to give college students something to discuss at 3am. However, work published last week in Physical Review Letters provides observational evidence that this could actually be the case.

“We have produced atomic metallic hydrogen in the laboratory at high pressure and low temperature,” say Harvard scientists Isaac Silvera and Ranga Dias in a new article that appears today in the AAAS journal Science . This straightforward comment could mean the end of an 80-year quest...and the start of an energy revolution.

Sandy beaches are often patterned with sunburned visitors, brightly colored towels, and poorly constructed sand castles. However, the wind can create much more intriguing patterns in sand, from tiny ripples to towering dunes.

Scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have broken the efficiency record for data transfer. Using a quantum communication process known as superdense coding, they squeezed through an average 1.67 bits of data per qubit. Qubits, which is short for "quantum bits," are units of data that utilize quantum properties to store information.

With a new camera system, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis can capture 100 billion frames per second in a single shot. This record-breaking design won’t improve the quality of your YouTube uploads (even very high speed video cameras only record a few thousand frames per second)—but it could improve your health.

I’m on my second Minnesota winter and it’s cold. On really cold days, your eyelashes can freeze and baby wipes become a useless block of ice if you leave them in the car. It’s pretty extreme, in my mind. All of this is put in perspective though, by new research published in Nature last week . A team of scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) cooled a tiny aluminum drum down to a temperature so cold that most scientists thought it was unreachable.

Whether you’re pulling out a splinter of wood or an eyebrow hair, tweezers are the go-to tool. For these and many other situations that involve moving an object too small to grasp with human hands, a $1.49 pair of metal tweezers is good enough. However, moving an object too small to see requires a much more complicated and expensive kind of tweezers.

It seems the search for particles of dark matter has come up short once again, leading some scientists to question whether we should be looking for particles at all. Two of the world's most massive detector projects—China's PandaX-II collaboration and the US's LUX group—have ended up empty-handed in their search for weakly interacting massive particles (or WIMPs), long considered one of the most plausible explanations for our galaxy's surprising rotational behavior .

Less than two months, ago we brought you the mysterious tale of fast radio bursts (FRBs), bright flashes of radio waves that last for just fractions of a second and most likely come from outside of our galaxy, but which we know little else about. Last week, the sequel to that story was released. In a press conference at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society , coordinated with a cover story in the journal Nature , astronomers announced that they had identified the origin of an FRB for the first time: a small, faint, dwarf galaxy more than 2.5 billion light years away. Companion papers have also been published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters ( here , here , and here ).

For Superman and Supergirl, it’s alien DNA. For Spiderman, it’s the bite. For Iron Man, it’s the suit. But for some “superfluids,” it’s the tiny, self-propelled swimmers that are the source of their power.