Category: phenomena
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Faster than light. In nothingness…
It has long been known that charged particles, such as electrons and protons, produce the electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom when their speeds exceed that of photons in the surrounding medium. This effect, known as Cherenkov emission, is responsible for the characteristic blue glow from water in a nuclear reactor, and is used to…
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Heat waves. Like… sound waves?
The next time you set a kettle to boil, consider this scenario: After turning the burner off, instead of staying hot and slowly warming the surrounding kitchen and stove, the kettle quickly cools to room temperature and its heat hurtles away in the form of a boiling-hot wave. We know heat doesn’t behave this way…
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Small little insects… Making the ocean move… Modern science… Shrimps laughing…
Scientists have demonstrated how some of the smallest creatures in the ocean could have the same outsized impact under the waves – with swarms of marine organisms inadvertently producing powerful currents that mix and churn a turbulent undersea environment. “Right now a lot of our ocean climate models don’t include the effect of animals, or…
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New states of matter. Fake reality. Real silence.
Researchers have recently produced a “human scale” demonstration of a new phase of matter called quadrupole topological insulators (QTI) that was recently predicted using theoretical physics. These were the first experimental findings to validate this theory. The researchers reported their findings in the journal Nature. The team’s work with QTIs was born out of the…
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Light speed. Less than 1000 m/s.
Researchers at TU Wien were the first to successfully detect Weyl particles in strongly correlated electron systems – that is, materials where the electrons have a strong interaction with each other. In materials like this, the Weyl particles move extremely slowly, despite having no mass. “The strong interactions in such materials usually lead, via the…
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