Physics

Public engagement event at a local high school with the Women and Minorities in the Physical Sciences group in graduate school By: Brean Prefontaine   We all know what is about to happen when someone asks, “What do/did you study?” As soon as you utter the word “physics” you have to brace for the inevitable “oh,

By: Hannah Pell “Assume the cow is a perfect sphere.”  Any of us who have taken a physics class or two has probably met the Spherical Cow at some point (or a version of it). How can I calculate the volume of an irregular, misshapen 3-D object like a cow? Well, I’ll smooth out the

By Hannah Pell Alice and Bob are recurring characters in science. They can usually be found chatting over the phone or playing games of chance with each other, such as poker or flipping coins. But no matter Alice’s and Bob’s thought-experiment scenario, there is always some sort of a communication problem at the core of

By: Hannah Pell The Starting Line As I write this, twenty cars are sitting at the starting line of the Formula One (F1) 70th Anniversary Grand Prix at Silverstone based in the UK. The drivers have just finished their formation lap, and the $10 million engines are idling at roughly 5000 rpm (for comparison, the

New research by the University of Oregon and partners at the United States Geologic Survey reveals the landscape dotted with 2835 volcanoes from Northern California to the border of Washington. This area is a center for volcanic activity due to the subducting Juan De Fuca plate which produces melt that rises up through the crust

Neutrino events from a supernova were first captured in 1987, when a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud exploded, seen here in a wide-field image from Hubble. Credits: NASA/STScI By Korena Di Roma Howley For a particle with no charge and nearly no mass, the neutrino gets a lot of scientific press—and it’s no wonder

By Allison Kubo Graphene is a comprised of a one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. This sheet can be wrapped into fullerenes, rolled into nanotubes, or stacked to form graphite the same thing uses ing pencils. All of these are made of carbon: diamonds, graphite, graphene are all different arrangements of

Dorothea Klumpke. Photo: Wikipedia By Korena Di Roma Howley Just before 1 a.m. on November 16, 1899, an American astronomer named Dorothea Klumpke began her voyage over Paris and northwest France in a balloon called La Centaure, from which she hoped to witness the Leonid meteor shower as nearly no one had done before. Handpicked

By Jonna Jasmin Güven I was pumping out the air from a vacuum tupperware box that had a marshmallow inside. The kids’ smiles were widening as the marshmallow was expanding inside the box. I asked one of the dads to try and remove the lid from the box. It wouldn’t come off as the vacuum

This x-ray map is much more than a beautiful desktop background. By Allison Kubo On June 19, the eRosita instrument aboard the Russian-German “Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma” (SRG) mission finished cataloging more that 1 million high energy x-ray sources more than had ever been recorded before this study. The image above shows our sky illuminated in x-rays, the

At 80 to 100 kilometers in circumference, the future supercollider, located near the LHC at the Swiss-French border, would dwarf its record-holding counterpart. Credit: CERN By Korena Di Roma Howley In a 100-kilometer leap for particle physics, the governing body of European lab CERN recently approved taking additional steps toward plans to build a $24-billion

By: Hannah Pell “Every time you turn around it seems that someone has published a new physics journal,” begins a Special Report in the August 1970 issue Physics Today. The report goes on to list more than 30 new physics and astronomy journals that started in 1968 and had been mentioned in the magazine within

Since the discovery of the Higgs Boson (or, more infamously, the “God Particle”) in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) based at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), particle physicists have sought to expand their ability to probe Nature’s deepest secrets. Although the Higgs was the last missing piece of the Standard Model

By Leah Poffenberger Artist’s representation of Pōniuāʻena. IMAGE CREDIT:  International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld Looking up at the night sky stars is a bit like going to a history museum: The light we see is giving us a glimpse into the past. When light is emitted from a star, it has to travel across the galaxy

By: Hannah Pell “The American Physical Society (APS) has a vision of the future of physics publishing, in 2020 or so.” So begins a 1993 Science article titled “Publication by Electronic Mail Takes Physics by Storm.” Burton Richter, then-president of APS and former head of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), elaborated: “Any physicist, any

Ximena Cid (second from left) stands with students in front of a mural on the CSUDH campus. Credit: CSUDH By Korena Di Roma Howley As a young girl growing up in Sacramento, California, Ximena Cid would sit on her roof and stare at the night sky. “I always had a love of the stars, of

The Case for Fahrenheit vs Celsius in terms of human comfort.  By Allison Kubo Hutchison Scientists have to know how to speak the languages of many units. Improper unit conversions have caused much heartache and suffering in the past, including the loss of a $125 million dollar Mars orbiter. In general, peer-reviewed science journals only

By: Hannah Pell Graphic from shutdownSTEM.com. Recently I started rereading When Physics Became King by Iwan Rhys Morus, a historian of science at Aberystwyth University in Wales. Published in 2005, Morus traces the development of physics through the nineteenth century, as the field gradually evolved from its roots in natural philosophy and mathematics to later

By Leah Poffenberger Everyday life is full of choices: Coffee or tea? Apples or oranges? iPhone or Android? We also have to tackle more serious questions, like who to vote for in an election. Especially for the important choices in our lives, these decisions don’t happen in a vacuum: We’re usually getting a lot of

We’ve all wished for weightlessness at some point in our lives—that fantastical quality that powers the magic of flying broomsticks and fuels our fascination with space travel. Although we’re a long way from floating down the street, physicists have developed ways to mitigate the effect of gravity, from carefully aligning sound waves to mimicking free