Applied Physics

Lift A Car With Two Phone Books

No matter how much force is applied (within reason, no hammer of Thor stuff) you can't separate two interleaved phone books by pulling on their spines. A new experiment shows it is even possible to suspend a car from them. Using a model that reproduce ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 9 2016 - 9:06am

New Type Of Nanowires, Built With Natural Gas

A new simple nanowire manufacturing technique uses self-catalytic growth process assisted by thermal decomposition of natural gas. According to the research team, this method is simple, reproducible, size-controllable, and cost-effective in that lithium-i ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 30 2016 - 9:59am

Why Diamonds Are More Of A Scientific Miracle Than You Think

Diamonds are made of carbon, graphite is also made of carbon. Both are natural, yet one is quite valuable and the other is a commodity. Because of basic similarities, everyone wants to know if the value and hype of diamonds are justified, especially when ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 4 2016 - 10:46am

LIGO, Gravitational Waves, And Laser Interferometry

UPDATE: LIGO has detected gravitational waves. ...

Article - Steve Schuler - Feb 11 2016 - 11:08am

Superconductivity Hypothesis Gets Some Experimental Confirmation

Superconductivity, a quantum phenomenon in which metals below a certain temperature develop flow of current with no loss or resistance, has been one of the most intriguing problems in physics, for over a century. First discovered in the element mercury in ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 6 2016 - 8:30am

Pi Day 2016 Project

For Pi Day 2016, I’ll demonstrate how to flash a Snap Circuits LED with the Kano Computer (my version of the Kano has the Raspberry Pi 2). I've lost count of how many computers I've built over the years, but I think it is safe to say that the Kan ...

Blog Post - Steve Schuler - Mar 18 2016 - 7:42am

Variable Speed Fan With Snap Circuits, Kano Computer

In a previous How-To Guide I demonstrated how to blink a Snap Circuits LED with the Kano Computer (blinking an LED is the “Hello World!” of hardware hacking) and in this guide I’ll demonstrate how to drive a variable speed fan with Snap Circuits and the K ...

Article - Steve Schuler - Mar 30 2016 - 8:08am

Emergent Parameters And High Throughput Screening

When optimizing in multi-dimensional parameter spaces, local maximums are not as much of a problem as being misguided by maximums that are constrained on a lower dimensional subspace. Therefore, so called ‘walk-in’ methods are necessary. They must explore ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jul 7 2016 - 11:22pm

Nanotech: The Most Dangerous Science Least Carefully Done

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Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jul 7 2016 - 11:21pm

A Flexible Evolving Approach To Computing

We already must deal with computers too much rather than too little, and there is already lots of advanced computing done also for example in materials science and nanotechnology, for example molecular dynamics (MD) and Monte Carlo simulations.[2] The mol ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jul 8 2016 - 7:09pm