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In 1987, a year after the breakthrough that revived high-temperature superconductivity, physicists cooled a ceramic of yttrium, barium and copper oxide to 93 kelvin and watched it levitate a magnet indefinitely — the first superconductor cold enough to run on liquid nitrogen instead of scarce, expensive helium
22+ hour, 10+ min ago (347+ words) Anything that superconducts above 77 K can, in principle, be cooled by simply keeping it wet with nitrogen. That opens the door to power cables that lose no energy over long distances, magnets strong enough to levitate trains, and sensitive detectors…...
When a lightning return stroke heats a channel only centimetres wide to roughly 30,000 kelvin, about five times the temperature of the Sun’s visible surface, the air expands so violently that the pressure wave rolls across the ground as thunder
20+ hour, 32+ min ago (1352+ words) A cloud-to-ground lightning return stroke can heat the air inside its narrow channel to roughly 30,000 kelvin, more than five times the temperature of the Sun’s visible surface. The heating happens within millionths of a second, forcing the air to expand…...
In 1971, engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email between two computers sitting side by side in the same room — he chose the @ symbol to separate user from machine because it was the only punctuation on the keyboard nobody was using
18+ hour, 40+ min ago (993+ words) In late 1971, in a nondescript office at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a 30-year-old engineer named Ray Tomlinson sat between two DEC PDP-10 minicomputers that were connected only through the ARPANET. He typed a message on one machine,…...
When you tilt a smartphone, gravity shifts microscopic silicon fingers inside its accelerometer by only a few nanometres, changing the capacitance between them and producing the electrical imbalance the phone reads as a new direction for down
19+ hour, 38+ min ago (1375+ words) Turn a smartphone from portrait to landscape and the display follows within a fraction of a second. The motion feels almost effortless, but the measurement begins with a physical structure inside the phone moving through a distance measured in nanometres....
A microwave oven works because water molecules have a slight positive and negative end — the magnetron flips an electric field 2.45 billion times a second, and the molecules twist back and forth so fast the friction becomes heat
19+ hour, 51+ min ago (403+ words) The cooking chamber is a metal box, and metal reflects microwaves almost perfectly. That is why the door has a fine mesh screen: the holes are much smaller than 12 cm, so the waves cannot escape, but visible light (wavelength under…...
In October 1957, a beachball-sized aluminium sphere called Sputnik 1 began sending 0.3-second pulses on two radio frequencies from orbit, signals amateur operators around the world could receive, making the space age suddenly audible from Earth
20+ hour, 48+ min ago (1432+ words) On 4 October 1957, a polished aluminium sphere 58 centimetres wide began circling Earth and sending a repetitive electronic pulse into the night. Sputnik 1 carried no camera, computer or solar panels, but its two radio transmitters made the first artificial satellite audible to…...
The retina of the mantis shrimp carries twelve types of colour receptor to the human eye's three — and yet experiments suggest it sees colour worse than we do, using the extra channels for speed instead of subtlety
20+ hour, 23+ min ago (622+ words) On paper. The actual experiments tell a stranger story. Compared with a human eye, this is baroque. Humans manage full colour vision with three cone opsins whose sensitivity curves overlap heavily; the brain compares their outputs to work out hue....
Your phone's 'battery health' number is mostly marketing — the real wear happens in the charge cycles nobody shows you
22+ hour, 36+ min ago (277+ words) Apple started showing cycle count on iPhone 15 and later, buried under Settings > General > About. It’s the single most useful number on the phone for judging battery wear, and it’s two menus deeper than the health percentage. That placement is a…...
GPS satellites tick about 38 microseconds a day faster than clocks on Earth — a relativistic drift Einstein predicted, and one the system corrects every orbit, or your location would drift 10 kilometres off within 24 hours
1+ day, 15+ min ago (531+ words) The 38-microsecond figure is actually the sum of two separate relativistic effects, and they push against each other. The first is special relativity, from Einstein’s 1905 paper. A clock in motion, seen from a stationary observer, ticks more slowly. GPS satellites…...
How did a Dutch prime minister's 1973 decision to ban cars every Sunday accidentally turn a whole country into the world's cycling capital within a decade?
1+ day, 17+ min ago (305+ words) Third, and most consequentially, the 1979 national transport policy plan for the first time set explicit modal-share targets favouring bicycles and public transport over cars in urban areas. The Netherlands became the first country in Europe to write “more people on…...