A batter hits a baseball, NASCAR has a 21-car crash, or maybe Thor punches the Hulk. When one object collides with another, we can describe the interaction with an impact force. But putting a specific number on that force is actually quite difficult.Let’s go over some methods we can use …
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I saw this post on Reddit: Would a cockroach survive a fall from the stratosphere? Oh, what a lovely question. But why stop there? The stratosphere only goes up 50 kilometers—what about a cockroach falling from outer space? Space starts at the Kármán line, which is 100 kilometers up (or …
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The plan for the first small-scale US nuclear reactor was exciting, ambitious, and unusual from the get-go. In 2015, a group of city- and county-run utilities across the Mountain West region announced that they were betting on a new frontier of nuclear technology: a mini version of a conventional plant …
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This Halloween, when you grab a candy bar, pay attention to the wrapper. In the United States, a "nutrition facts" label has been required for all packaged foods since 1994, giving the serving size and the amount of sugar, protein, fat, and sodium the food contains. But the most interesting …
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The world relies on electromagnetic waves for communications: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5G, even radio waves. But suppose you want to prevent a device from communicating—or interfering—with the rest of the world. You can't block EM waves, but you can cancel them by surrounding the device with an electrically conducting material. We …
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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1848, when Louis Pasteur was a young chemist still years away from discovering how to sterilize milk, he discovered something peculiar about crystals that accidentally formed when an industrial chemist boiled wine for too long. Half of the crystals …
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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini, and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in …
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Although Spider-Man started as a comic book character, he has made his way to live-action video several times. I remember seeing him appear on The Electric Company in the 1970s for a short skit; it was cool but a little odd. In the modern era of live-action Spider-Man movies, we …
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Time is not to be trusted. This should come as news to no one. Yet recent times have left people feeling betrayed that the reliable metronome laying down the beat of their lives has, in a word, gone bonkers. Time sulked and slipped away, or slogged to a stop, rushing …
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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an infinitely thin, inch-long needle on a flat surface, then rotate it so that it points in every …
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