Category Physics

Ever since Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered the world of bacteria through a microscope in the late seventeenth century, humans have tried to look deeper into the world of the infinitesimally small.

There are, however, physical limits to how closely we can examine an object using traditional optical methods. This is known as the diffraction limit and is determined by the fact that light manifests as a wave...

There is power in numbers when generating electricity from the movement of molecules. Researchers tested a molecular energy harvesting device that captures the energy from the natural motion of molecules in a liquid. Their work showed molecular motion can be used to generate a stable electric current. To create the device, they submerged nanoarrays of piezoelectric material in liquid, allowing the movement of the liquid to move the strands like seaweed waving in the ocean, except in this case the movement is on the molecular scale, and the strands are made of zinc oxide. When the zinc oxide material waves, bends, or deforms under motion, it generates electric potential.

Wave energy technology is a proven source of power generation, but there is power inherent in every molecule of l...

An international team of scientists, including from the University of Cambridge, have launched a new research collaboration that will leverage the same technology behind ChatGPT to build an AI-powered tool for scientific discovery.

While ChatGPT deals in words and sentences, the team’s AI will learn from numerical data and physics simulations from across scientific fields to aid scientists in modeling everything from supergiant stars to the Earth’s climate.

The team launched the initiative, called Polymathic AI earlier this week, alongside the publication of a series of related papers on the arXiv open access repository.

“This will completely change how people use AI and machine learning in science,” said Polymathic AI principal investigator S...

Physicists have shown that simulating models of hypothetical time travel can solve experimental problems that appear impossible to solve using standard physics.

If gamblers, investors and quantum experimentalists could bend the arrow of time, their advantage would be significantly higher, leading to significantly better outcomes.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have shown that by manipulating entanglement — a feature of quantum theory that causes particles to be intrinsically linked — they can simulate what could happen if one could travel backwards in time...