Yellowstone Caldera Chronicles is a weekly column written by scientists and collaborators of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. This week’s contribution is from Michael Poland, geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey and scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. May is an exciting time for geologists when it comes to Yellowstone National Park. By that month enough snow […]
Somewhere out in the cosmos, there’s the physics equivalent of a unicorn. Catching even a glimpse of this oddity that looks like the isolated tip of a magnet would be like a beacon in the night, pointing the way to grand, unifying theories of absolutely everything. Yet aside from one tiny exception in the early […]
Cendikiawan Suryaatmadja may not be able to legally buy a lottery ticket or vote yet, but the 17-year-old University of Waterloo whiz has already completed his master’s degree in physics. “It feels good. I am very proud of it,” he humbly shared. Suryaatmadja, originally from West Java, Indonesia, came to the Ontario city when he was 12 to […]
Octopuses are doomed to be orphans from a very young age. After a female octopus lays her eggs, she stops eating and begins self-mutilating, tearing off her skin and biting off the tips of her tentacles. By the time a young octopus wriggles out of its egg, its mother is already dead. A few […]
Every time you take a step, space itself glows with a soft warmth. Called the Fulling–Davies–Unruh effect (or sometimes just Unruh effect if you’re pushed for time), this eerie glow of radiation emerging from the vacuum is akin to the mysterious Hawking radiation that’s thought to surround black holes. Only in this case, it’s […]
Mistakes happen. Especially when it comes to the replication of vast sequences of DNA inside our cells. It’s a good thing too. If not for the errors in our genes we refer to as mutations, natural selection would be a no-go, and life would be dead in the water. As crucial as mutations are […]
Solar flares, the largest known explosions in the solar system, are triggered by a process called “magnetic reconnection” that occurs in plasma. Plasma is a form of superheated gas so energised its atoms break apart, forming a soup of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons that is exquisitely sensitive to magnetic fields. Reconnection occurs […]
Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: Of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock. But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously. How can that be, and what would it mean? It’ll take […]
Physics buff BOMBS on simple question on The Chase W bosons are elementary particles named for the role they play in mediating the so-called weak force — one of the fundamental interactions alongside electromagnetism, gravitation and the strong force that holds protons and neutrons together to create atomic nuclei. The weak force, which instead acts […]
The scientific search to explain the structure of the universe has been given new impetus by the discovery that the particle responsible for one of four fundamental forces is heavier than existing theory would permit. Physicists working at the Fermilab laboratory near Chicago analysed debris from millions of high-energy particle accelerator collisions, before concluding that […]
