If you’ve ever snapped a bundle of dry spaghetti before putting it in the pot, you know what a mess it makes. Small pieces of pasta fly off everywhere as the pieces snap into tiny bits along the middle. The way spaghetti breaks is fascinating, though. Go get a single piece of spaghetti, grasp it

The macro world as we know it is governed by Newton’s laws of motion and gravity – what goes up, must come down. But a team of physicists from Columbia University have put forward a theoretical paper that turns this idea on its head. They say there might actually be particles with negative mass –

Physics is a huge, complex field. It also happens to be one of the most fascinating, dealing with everything from black holes and wormholes to quantum teleportation and gravitational waves. But unless you have an innate knowledge of the field, it’s pretty hard to figure out how all these concepts actually fit together – and

Whenever the 15th century polymath Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t painting masterpieces or coming up with new ways to launch humans into the sky, he could often be found outdoors, quietly contemplating the eddies of water flowing downstream. What amazed the Renaissance master has since puzzled countless scientists. Half a millennium later, we’re still scratching our

Watching an explosion in super slow motion is what we expect from just about any Hollywood action blockbuster. But capturing details of an explosion that’s about the same size as a protein? That might not have the same appeal as a Michael Bay movie, but don’t let that fool you. There’s a lot we can

Using a new holographic technology, researchers have been able to twist and manipulate a beam of laser light to tie it into knots, creating complex, three-dimensional light structures. Why? To study what happens to the space around them, of course. It involves manipulating something called polarisation. To our eyes, a laser beam looks like it’s

It’s a nightmarish scenario – the elevator seals you inside, rises several floors, judders to a halt, and then SNAP! The frayed cable fails, and you plummet. Can you save yourself by jumping at the right time? In this predicament, the key point to realise is that along with the elevator, you are also falling.

The metal lanthanum strontium copper oxide might not mean much to most of us, but to physicists it just might hold the secret to developing electronics that conduct electricity with near perfect efficiency. When placed inside a powerful magnetic field, the substance doesn’t conduct quite like other metals. Once we learn why, we might at

Theoretical research by an international team of physicists has discovered that the Great Pyramid of Giza can concentrate electromagnetic energy in its internal chambers and under its base. And although the ancient Egyptian’s probably weren’t aware of this weird design quirk, the study could be important for nanoparticle research in the future. “Applications of modern

The Large Hadron Collider below Switzerland and France has just accelerated its first atoms to almost the speed of light, and the results have “exceeded predictions“. The test was an exciting proof-of-concept that could lead to a new series of groundbreaking experiments and potentially even new types of matter, such as dark matter. Usually, the

Six years ago, a group of astrophysicists came to the startling realisation that if certain assumptions about the quantum physics of black holes were true, their horizons should be ablaze with high energy particles. This “firewall” would pose a big problem, not just for suicidal space tourists, but for physics itself. It just shouldn’t be

Two of the most bizarre phenomena in quantum physics have been brought together in a single experiment for the first time – and scientists are already using the set-up to probe the very limits of reality. With the aid of two wires placed in very close proximity on a microchip, both the very weird Casimir effect

Scientists have created a tiny rotor that rotates at speeds of up to 60 billion revolutions a minute – the fastest-spinning human-made rotor in history, and 100,000 times faster than your average dental drill. The record-breaking invention not only pushes the boundaries of physics but could also be used to study some of the mysteries

Electron microscopes have been capable of taking snapshots of individual atoms for nearly half a century. But we’ve never seen anything quite on this scale. A new method for catching and measuring the spray of electron beams is giving us a whole new resolution of the sub-ångström world, opening the way to studying molecular structures

Space agencies and private companies already have advanced plans to send humans to Mars in the next few years – ultimately colonising it. And with a growing number of discoveries of Earth-like planets around nearby stars, long-distance space travel has never seemed more exciting. However, it isn’t easy for humans to survive in space for

If you’re struggling through a course in Calculus 101 in your tertiary degree right now, wishing you’d paid attention in high school, we’ve got some good news: it probably wouldn’t have helped. A study of more than 6,200 freshmen at 133 colleges and universities across the US has found you’d have been better off mastering

Physicists from Eötvös University in Budapest and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle have taken an innovative approach to determining when the first organic chemicals formed, and it turns out they could be a lot older than we imagined. Complex organic chemistry once considered unique to life might not only be ubiquitous throughout the

In June 2017, physicists achieved ‘liquid light’ at room temperature for the first time ever, making this strange form of matter more accessible than ever. This matter is both a superfluid, which has zero friction and viscosity, and a kind of Bose-Einstein condensate - sometimes described as the fifth state of matter – and it allows light to actually flow

Einstein was sure that all objects fall in the same way in a gravitational field, irrespective of their own gravity. It’s called the equivalence principle, and scientists just showed it holds firm using a distant triple-star system discovered in 2012. This system contains a closely orbiting neutron star and a white dwarf, along with a

According to an American study, people spend around 1.6 billion hours each year standing idly at the roadside, at the cost of US$2.6 billion to the American economy. With all this waiting around, it’s only natural to question whether pushing the “walk” button will help us get to our destination sooner. To answer this question,

One of the world’s leading plasma research facilities just broke a new record, showing we really are getting closer to the wonderful goal of fusion power – a virtually limitless supply of clean energy. Experiments on the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator – a device that uses magnets to confine clouds of plasma (hot, charged gas) –

Hidden 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) under Mount Ikeno in Japan is a place that looks like a supervillain’s dream. Super-Kamiokande (or “Super-K” as it’s sometimes referred to) is a neutrino detector. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles which travel through space and pass through solid matter as though it were air. Studying these particles is helping scientists

A group of physicists are questioning our understanding of how quarks – a type of elementary particle – arrange themselves under extreme conditions. And their quest is revealing that elements beyond the edge of the periodic table might be fair weirder than we thought. Deep in the depths of the periodic table there are monsters

One of the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics could be explained by an equally weird idea – that causation can run backwards in time as well as forwards. What Einstein called “spooky” action at a distance could theoretically be evidence of retrocausality, which is the particle equivalent of you getting a stomach ache today thanks

The universe that Stephen Hawking spent a lifetime studying now knows his voice. Following Hawking’s death in March, the renowned British physicist, who had battled a debilitating degenerative motor neuron disease for decades, was remembered at a memorial service Friday at Westminster Abbey.  His ashes were buried between Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton and later covered with a gravestone — etched with an equation he used to

Few areas of science are as mind-bending as quantum physics – from Stephen Hawking’s black holes to the ‘spooky action’ that challenges our understanding of reality, there’s a lot to make us amazed. But because quantum anything can be tricky to understand, people also use it to explain phenomena that turn out to have far

Quantum technology promises big things for digital security and computing power, but the very thing it relies upon – quantum entanglement – has so far proven too fickle to reliably control. A new method for entangling particles is set to change that, providing the all-important quantum states when we want it, for as long as

As researchers around the globe race to create the next element on the periodic table – an atom that contains 119 protons – one scientist from Michigan State University is looking into where the table might end. While there’s no conclusive answer, it seems we still have a lot left to discover. According to nuclear

We learn about some awesome science in high school – like Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Periodic table, and DNA replication. The knowledge we pick up there sets the foundations for all the other amazing things we go on to study. But science definitely doesn’t end at high school, and it’s once you take your

The Leaning Tower of Pisa and its 5.5 degree lean has vexed engineers for centuries. Partially constructed on unexpectedly soft soil, the ancient bell tower began to lean before it was even finished, a historical goof that went on to become one of the world’s historical oddities – and made the tower a UNESCO World

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider have made a major new detection of the famous Higgs boson, this time catching details on a rare interaction with one of the heaviest fundamental particles known to physics – the top quark. The brief mingling of these incredibly rare encounters has provided physicists with important information on the nature of

Using the whole Solar System as a lab, and our most advanced time-keeping instruments for equipment, scientists have helped to verify the ‘Einstein elevator’ hypothesis – one of the central components of his general theory of relativity. The theory deals with the basics of mass, gravity, space, and time – so proving as best as

A neutrino detector has just made an incredible detection: far more of the mysterious particles than they expected. And the best explanation for this mysterious abundance is the existence of a hypothetical type of neutrino, called the “sterile” neutrino. The finding, made at Fermilab’s MiniBooNE, replicates a result from decades ago. Back in the 90s,

The world’s biggest diamond company, De Beers, recently announced it would start selling synthetic diamond gemstones for the first time in its 130-year history. Artificial diamonds have been manufactured since the 1950s but De Beers has long resisted moving into the synthetic market. The company now believes that technology is efficient enough to produce large

Eighteen-year-old student Ryan Chester won US$400,000 back in 2015 for this video explaining Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, as part of the inaugural Breakthrough Junior Challenge – an international competition that aims to inspire the next generation of scientists and science communicators. And it’s not hard to see why. If you heard the words, “Einstein’s

Not that you could tell by looking at it, but the glass of water sitting on your desk contains two different kinds of water molecule rotating in subtly different ways. A recent experiment managed to separate them, discovering one is much better at reacting than the other. We don’t expect this ‘better’ water to become

A rare earth element that doesn’t get much mention could become the key to upgrading atomic clocks to become even more accurate. This could help us explore space and track satellites, and even keep the world’s time zones in sync. Atomic clocks use the oscillations of atoms under laser fire as a measurement of time, in