Physics

166 articles with this tag

How Tornadoes Form—and Why the U.S. Gets the Most Science

How Tornadoes Form—and Why the U.S. Gets the Most

An explainer on the atmospheric mechanics behind tornado formation, why the United States experiences more tornadoes than any other country, and how m...

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How Synchrotrons Work—the World's Brightest Light Science

How Synchrotrons Work—the World's Brightest Light

Synchrotron light sources accelerate electrons to near light speed, producing X-rays billions of times brighter than the sun. These massive machines p...

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Did Mars Have an Ocean? What the Evidence Shows Science

Did Mars Have an Ocean? What the Evidence Shows

Scientists have debated whether Mars once held a vast northern ocean for nearly four decades. New geological evidence, including a continental shelf '...

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How the Antikythera Mechanism Works—the First Computer Science

How the Antikythera Mechanism Works—the First Computer

The Antikythera mechanism, a 2,100-year-old Greek device recovered from a shipwreck, used dozens of interlocking bronze gears to predict eclipses, tra...

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How Gravitational Lensing Works—the Universe's Telescope Science

How Gravitational Lensing Works—the Universe's Telescope

Gravitational lensing bends light from distant objects around massive cosmic structures, acting as nature's own telescope. This guide explains the thr...

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How Reusable Rockets Work—and Why They Slashed Costs Technology

How Reusable Rockets Work—and Why They Slashed Costs

Reusable rockets land themselves after launch and fly again, cutting the cost of reaching orbit by up to 70 percent. Here is the engineering behind pr...

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How Fast Breeder Reactors Work—and Why They Matter Science

How Fast Breeder Reactors Work—and Why They Matter

Fast breeder reactors produce more nuclear fuel than they consume, promising virtually unlimited energy—but their history is marked by technical failu...

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What Is a Dirac Fluid—and Why It Matters Science

What Is a Dirac Fluid—and Why It Matters

Electrons in graphene can flow like a nearly frictionless liquid called a Dirac fluid, mimicking the quark-gluon plasma found at the birth of the univ...

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How Supermassive Black Holes Wake Up After Millions of Years Science

How Supermassive Black Holes Wake Up After Millions of Years

Most supermassive black holes sit quietly at the centers of galaxies, but some reignite after millions of years of dormancy, launching jets that stret...

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How Ice Cores Work—and What They Reveal About Climate Science

How Ice Cores Work—and What They Reveal About Climate

Ice cores drilled from glaciers and ice sheets preserve up to 1.2 million years of climate history in layers of frozen snow, trapped gas bubbles, and...

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How Crowd Crushes Work—and Why They Kill Science

How Crowd Crushes Work—and Why They Kill

Crowd crushes kill thousands worldwide through compressive asphyxia, not trampling. Understanding the physics of crowd density, pressure waves, and cr...

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What Is the Hubble Tension—and Why Cosmology Is in Crisis Science

What Is the Hubble Tension—and Why Cosmology Is in Crisis

Two reliable methods for measuring the universe's expansion rate give stubbornly different answers, and the gap is now so large that physicists suspec...

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