Aestus Ajith

Nanoparticles can be pushed by pure nothingness. Researchers have discovered a new and unexpected force that acts on nanoparticles in a vacuum, allowing them to be pushed around by pure 'nothingness'. Of course, quantum physics is beginning to make it clear that 'nothingness', as we like to think of it,  doesn't actually exist  - even vacuums are filled with tiny electromagnetic fluctuations. This new research is further proof that we're only beginning to understand the strange forces that are at work at the smallest level of the material world, by showing how nothingness can drive lateral motion. So how can a vacuum carry force? One of the first things we learn in classical physics is that in a perfect vacuum - a place entirely devoid of matter - friction can't exist, because empty space can't exert a force on objects travelling through it. But, in recent years, quantum physicists have shown that vacuums are actually filled by tiny electrom...

This could explain one of the oldest mysteries in physics. Despite sounding like the most egregious contradiction in physics, hot water appears to freeze faster than cold water under certain circumstances. The phenomenon can be traced back to  Aristotle himself , but after centuries of experiments demonstrating this phenomenon, no one’s been able to explain it.  Now physicists are pointing to strange properties of hydrogen bonds as the solution to one of the oldest mysteries in physics - but others are claiming the so-called Mpemba effect doesn’t even exist at all. For a bit of background into the  Mpemba effect , this phenomenon has been confounding physicists since Aristotle first noticed it more than 2,000 years ago. After similar accounts from the likes of  Francis Bacon and René Descartes , the possibility of hot water freezing faster than cold water finally gained widespread acceptance in the 1960s, thanks to a Tanzanian schoolboy who noticed the ef...

Wait, what? One of the first things you learn about evolution in school is that the human body has a number of  'vestigial' parts  - appendix, wisdom teeth, tailbone - that gradually fell out of use as we adapted to more advanced lifestyles than our primitive ancestors. But while our wisdom teeth are definitely causing us  more pain than good  right now, the human appendix could be more than just a ticking time bomb sitting in your abdomen. A new study says it could actually serve an important biological function - and one that humans aren’t ready to give up. Researchers from Midwestern University traced the appearance, disappearance, and reemergence of the appendix in several mammal lineages over the past 11 million years, to figure out how many times it was cut and brought back due to evolutionary pressures.  They found that the organ has evolved  at least 29 times  - possibly as many as 41 times - throughout mammalian evolution, and has ...

What's cooler than cool? For the first time, physicists have cooled a mechanical object to a temperature colder than previously thought possible, taking it below the so-called "quantum limit" and bending the laws of physics. Using a new technique, the team managed to chill a microscopic mechanical drum to an unheard-of  360 microKelvin , or 10,000 times colder than the vacuum of space. It's the coldest mechanical object on record. "It’s much colder than any naturally occurring temperature anywhere in the Universe," team leader John Teufel from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado,  told Leah Crane from  New Scientist . "The results were a complete surprise to experts in the field," added one of the researchers, José Aumentado,  in a press release .  To be clear, this isn't the coldest object ever - that title goes to  Bose-Einstein condensates . Bose-Einstein condensates are a dilute gas of ...

Defying one of the most fundamental laws of conductors. Researchers have identified a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat - an incredibly useful property that defies our current understanding of how conductors work. The metal contradicts something called the  Wiedemann-Franz Law , which basically states that good conductors of electricity will also be proportionally good conductors of heat, which is why things like motors and appliances get so hot when you use them regularly. But a team in the US has shown that this isn't the case for metallic  vanadium dioxide  (VO 2 ) - a material that's already well known for its strange ability to switch from a  see-through insulator  to a conductive metal at the temperature of  67 degrees Celsius  (152 degrees Fahrenheit).  "This was a totally unexpected finding,"  said lead researcher Junqiao Wu , from Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division. "It shows a drastic bre...

"Life will change completely." Scientists chasing the dream of  quantum computing  - technology that would grant us unprecedented processing power - just got their biggest break yet, because the first ever open-source blueprint for a practical quantum computer has been revealed. This blueprint, which outlines how to make a quantum computer the size of a football-pitch, claims to solve previously 'uncrackable' problems using existing technology - meaning the revolutionary technology could be finally within our reach. "[W]e are now publishing the actual nuts-and-bolts construction plan for a large-scale quantum computer," one of the team, Winfried Hensinger from the Ion Quantum Technology Group at Sussex University in the UK,  told  The Independent. "Life will change completely. We will be able to do certain things we could never even dream of before." In case you’re not up to speed with the whole quantum computing saga, the technolog...

We snooze to lose. We all know that if we want what we've studied during the day to stick, it's best to get a good night's sleep. And while scientists have long understood that our memories rely on connections being built between neurons in our brains, it's not been clear how sleep actually helps to consolidate that information. Now, two new studies have found biological evidence that expains the age-old wisdom that if we want to remember, we need to sleep to forget. It's natural that we're curious about why we fall unconscious for up to 16 hours every day. One  recent hypothesis  suggested that sleep flushes out potentially toxic proteins which build up in the brain during the day. And recent studies have found that if we don't get enough sleep, we  increase our risk  of developing cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, not to mention  neurodegenerative disorders  such as Parkinson's disease. Now, a pair of studies from the University...