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In the vastness of empty space surrounding Earth, the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Its face, periodically filled with light and devoured by darkness, has an ever-changing, but dependable presence in our skies. In this article, we’ll learn about the Moon and its path around our planet, but to experience that journey first-hand, we have to enter the cosmos itself. This article has many interactive demonstrations which are best seen on the website.
The dream of soaring in the sky like a bird has captivated the human mind for ages. Although many failed, some eventually succeeded in achieving that goal. These days we take air transportation for granted, but the physics of flight can still be puzzling. In this article we’ll investigate what makes airplanes fly by looking at the forces generated by the flow of air around the aircraft’s wings. More specifically, we’ll focus on the cross section of those wings to reveal the shape of an airfoil – you can see it presented in yellow below: This article has many interactive demonstrations which are best seen on the website.
There is something delightful about riding a bicycle. Once mastered, the simple action of pedaling to move forward and turning the handlebars to steer makes bike riding an effortless activity. In the demonstration below, you can guide the rider with the slider, and you can also drag the view around to change the camera angle: Compared to internal combustion engines or mechanical watches, bicycles are fairly simple machines – most of their parts operate in plain sight. This article has many interactive demonstrations which are best seen on the website.
In the world of modern portable devices, it may be hard to believe that merely a few decades ago the most convenient way to keep track of time was a mechanical watch. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components. Over the course of this article I’ll explain the workings of the mechanism seen in the demonstration below. You can drag the device around to change your viewing angle, and you can use the slider to peek at what’s going on inside: This article has many interactive demonstrations which are best seen on the website.
More in science
Please don’t ask me about the illegal way…I’m not telling you
Systems thinkers fail because they ignore an important fact: systems fight back.
The James Webb Space Telescope has found a lonely black hole in the early universe that’s as heavy as 50 million suns. A major discovery, the object confounds theories of the young cosmos. The post A Single, ‘Naked’ Black Hole Rewrites the History of the Universe first appeared on Quanta Magazine
A few more interesting tidbits from the concluding half-day of the DOE ECMP PI meeting: Dmitri Basov showed some of the remarkable experiments enabled by layers of MoOCl2, which in the IR is an intrinsically hyperbolic optical material. This material has unusual plasmonic properties considering its high resistivity. These include peculiar cavity effects such as modifying superfluid density of a proximally coupled superconductor. Leonid Butov explained some remarkable evidence for superfluidity of indirect excitons excited in the moire bilayer of MoSe2/WSe2. Low temperature mean free paths of these objects can exceed hundreds of microns (!). Cui-Zu Chang showed evidence that truly stoichiometric FeTe is actually a superconductor with a critical temperature of about 13.5 K, rather than the usual thinking that it is an antiferromagnetic metal. Apparently an extra 2% of interstitial iron is enough to kill superconductivity and induce AFM order. James McIver presented an example of how nonlinear optical effects in an optically driven (Floquet) Weyl semimetal seem to vary linearly with driving field - anomalously strong. Dmytro Bozhko showed a really neat technique, using Brillouin light scattering to map out the dispersion of phonons and magnons in YIG, and to extend this approach with a special hollow-core optical fiber to low temperatures with the motivation of probing magnon superfluidity in a particular antiferromagnetic insulator. Ray Ashoori used his characteristically pretty quantum capacitance measurement technique to examine the density+displacement field+magnetic field phase diagram of 5-layer rhombohedral graphene, revealing some surprising fractional Chern insulator states. Claudia Ojeda-Aristizabal discussed some mesoscopic transport measurements in bilayer graphene, where an adsorbed layer of spin-containing CuPc molecules seems to affect both decoherence and the trigonal warping contribution to it (related to intervalley scattering). Feng Wang and You Zhou both discussed recent measurements looking at Wigner crystals and their properties in 2D TMDs, through a variety of means. Liuyan Zhao showed some very rich physics obtained in studies that moiré stack bilayers of the van der Waals insulating magnet CrI3. Unfortunately I missed the last talk because of the need to head to the airport. Overall, the meeting was very good. Program PI meetings can tend to become less about telling coherent scientific stories and more about trying to show everything someone has done in the last three years. This meeting avoided that, with clear talks that generally focused on one main result, and that made it much more engaging. As good as tools for virtual gatherings have become, there really is no substitute for an in-person event when you can just talk to someone by the coffee about some new idea.
Western wildfires are producing massive plumes of smoke that have, in recent years, clouded eastern skies. But a new study finds that, paradoxically, heat from fires is reshaping weather patterns in ways that are actually improving overall air quality on the East Coast. Read more on E360 →
