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Oct 1, 2024 | 
pubs.aip.org | Alex Lopatka |Jennifer Sieben |Richard J. Fitzgerald
Scouting for a new research area, Larry Abbott, who had made his name as a theoretical particle physicist, says it was “love at first sight” when he heard neurons pulsating on an audio monitor. Alexie Leauthaud was forced to evacuate her home in the Santa Cruz Mountains during a 2020 wildfire. That experience, plus a comprehension of the scale of climate change–induced migration, prompted her to expand beyond her research on dark energy and dark matter into ways to adapt to the warming planet.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
pubs.aip.org | Alex Lopatka |Jennifer Sieben |Richard J. Fitzgerald
Jamie Tayar describes her assistant professorship in the University of Florida’s department of astronomy as akin to running a small business. “You have to bid on contracts or grants, hire and manage personnel or students, deal with the finances, and communicate results to stakeholders in the form of grant reports, papers, and colloquia,” she says.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
pubs.aip.org | Daniel Garisto |Emily Caldwell |Alex Lopatka |Andreas Mandelis
By employing finely tuned microwave fields, researchers limit collisions between molecules of sodium cesium and cool them down to 6 nK. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/pt.uufx.loayContent License:FreeViewEISSN:1945-0699 In a gas chilled to the nanokelvin regime, particles with integer spin can all settle into the same ground state.
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Jun 1, 2024 | 
pubs.aip.org | Alex Lopatka |Andreas Mandelis |Emily Caldwell
Topics Energy levels, Vacuum ultraviolet radiation, Clocks, Laser spectroscopy, Atomic and molecular spectroscopy, Nuclear physics Jules Janssen was a 19th-century umbraphile: He traveled the world to witness solar eclipses. During one such event in 1868 in India, he saw something that would help to shape the understanding of both the Sun’s inner workings and the periodic table.
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Jun 1, 2024 | 
pubs.aip.org | Alex Lopatka |Andreas Mandelis |Emily Caldwell
When the Nintendo Virtual Boy was released in 1995, it was perhaps the earliest consumer product to use LEDs in a display. It used only a 1D row of 224 red-colored pixels for its monochrome, stereoscopic 3D display.
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Jun 1, 2024 | 
pubs.aip.org | Alex Lopatka |Andreas Mandelis |Emily Caldwell
Topics Electricity generation, Electric power transmission, Electrical grid, Composite materials, United States Department of Energy Following 15 years of stagnating electricity consumption in the US, demand is now on the rise, driven by a proliferation of power-hungry data centers and by the increasing adoption of electric vehicles and heat pumps.
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Jun 1, 2024 | 
pubs.aip.org | Alex Lopatka |Andreas Mandelis |Emily Caldwell
"The International Association of Physics Students will change your life,” is something Ruhi Chitre kept hearing at a conference for women in physics in 2019. Eager to see what the fuss was about, later that year Chitre traveled from her base in the UK to Germany for the annual International Conference of Physics Students (ICPS), the flagship event of the association, known as IAPS. For her, the prediction proved true. The ICPS showcased possible career avenues for physics students.
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Jun 1, 2024 | 
pubs.aip.org | Alex Lopatka |Andreas Mandelis |Emily Caldwell
Topics Mechanical engineering, Forensic science, Optical imaging, Stereoscopy, Educational assessment, Knowledge, National Institute of Standards and Technology, News and events Someone drops a dead body at a hospital. Bullets from the decedent and from a wall where a shooting took place are found to possess matching toolmarks—striations and other markings in the softer bullet material made by imperfections in the gun’s barrel.
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Apr 12, 2024 | 
pubs.aip.org | Ryan Dahn |Toni Feder |Alex Lopatka
The total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 propelled Albert Einstein to international celebrity. During the precious moments when the Moon blotted out the solar disk, a team of astronomers, including Arthur Eddington, measured the deflection of starlight by the Sun’s gravitational field and found it to be consistent with the amount predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity (see the article by Daniel Kennefick, Physics Today, March 2009, page 37).
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Apr 1, 2024 | 
pubs.aip.org | Toni Feder |Alex Lopatka
Dry salt lakes are an extraordinary part of desert landscapes. Their surfaces are often covered by strikingly regular polygonal shapes bounded by narrow ridges. Familiar to millions of tourists who have visited Death Valley, shown in figure 1, or Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni—Earth’s largest known natural source of lithium—these otherworldly patterns inspired the Star Wars planet Crait, site of the climactic battle of The Last Jedi.
