Grand challenges for physics in the US
Experts identify the most pressing problems in physics today
Read article: Turbulent times for fluids
Turbulent times for fluids
Turbulence is highlighted by imaging methods from high-energy physics
Physics and the stock market: playing with fire
Combustion theory predicts when shares will jump in value
The physics of human traffic
It is straightforward to incorporate the obvious physical attributes of people in a crowd, like pedestrian mass and velocity, into the simulations. But Helbing’s team went on to include psycholo...
Strength is weakness on the Internet
In a ‘scale-free’ network of many interconnected nodes, like the Internet, most of the nodes are connected to a relatively small number of other nodes. Only a very small minority have a la...
Heat flow surprise in space
On Earth, convection or thermal diffusion dominates heat transfer. But these effects are extremely weak in zero gravity, and adiabatic compression can dominate. To observe local overheating and adiaba...
Turbulence turns elastic
Polymer films are used in to make many mass-produced products, such as compact discs. It has been known for some time that the flow rate of liquid polymers can become irregular during the manufacturin...
Burning mystery remains
The group studied three different weights of paper in their experiments. Sheets of paper were place in a combustion chamber and lit by an electric wire. The propagating front of the fire was recorded ...
World order upset by new citation study
Using citation data from the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia, Katz has found that there is in fact a power-law or “fractal” relationship between the number of citation...
Condensates in a whirl
Physicists have been attempting to create a vortex in a dilute Bose condensate since these systems were first created in 1995. In principle, atomic condensates are ideal systems in which to study vort...
