Category Archives: Physics

Why I won’t talk about neutrinos

Because I don’t know enough on the subject to say anything about it. What I do know however is that the finding is exciting, regardless of the final result. Science thrives in being challenged, and shows humility in front of facts.

Fusione nucleare e fusione del nucleo. Due cose diverse (In Italian)

This post is for my Italian readers. There’s no English version because the issue does not exist in English, only in Italian. It is relative to the misunderstanding between the terms “meltdown” and “fusion”, in Italian both translated as “fusione”. I proceed saying that what unfortunately happened in Japan is a reactor core meltdown, not [...]

The Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect: levitating magnets

Recently, I had the chance to see a presentation of cool scientific magic: the Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect. What you can see here is a magnet (the yellow-red cylinder) levitating above a small dish of superconductive material, and consequently free to spin in mid-air. The superconductor must be kept at liquid nitrogen temperature (-196 degrees C) to [...]

LHC just made history

The Large Hadron Collider just achieved the first collisions among protons at 7 tera electronvolts (TeV) at center of mass, smashing together two beams of protons at 3.5 TeV each. The setup has been compared to shooting needles from opposite sides of the Atlantic and have them impact halfway. What we have today in front [...]

When science meets art: ferrofluid spiral

It is always a pleasure when scientific findings are used for impressive exhibitions of beauty and harmony. Sachiko Kodama is a Japanese professor and artist who took advantage of new materials to produce an amazing display of beauty The Morpho Spirals work by applying a music-controlled magnetic field to a ferrofluid, a class of substances [...]

Periodic table of videos

I found this very interesting site about the periodic table of elements, from the University of Nottingham. For each element, there’s a video showing the characteristics of the element, and a brief commentary. Worth checking out if you always had some curiosity about the chemical elements, what they look like, and how they behave. They [...]

Non-newtonian fluids

I must confess: I have a crush on non-newtonian fluids. They are so strange and beautiful… They defeat intuition by respecting the laws of nature… and they are fun to play with! Fluids can be characterized by a parameter known as viscosity. We all have direct experience of viscosity, as it measures the “ease of [...]

Smashing a car at the speed of sound

Since I moved abroad, I rediscovered good TV. And Mythbuster is definitely an interesting show. Adam and Jamie are so fantastic in exceeding expectations every time. But this time, they did more. So, the legend says that two trucks smashing onto each other pancake a car so badly that nobody is able to spot it [...]

LHC proton dump

How to stop a beam of protons traveling at 99.99 % of the speed of light and able to melt 500 kg of copper in less than a second ? I’ve found this interesting article about how to dispose of the proton beam from the Large Hadron Collider. The amount of energy and the focus [...]

Triboluminescence

A few days ago I received a letter. While opening it, I was able to spot a considerably bright blue luminescence coming from the line where the glue separated. I heard many times about this phenomenon, but never able to witness it. It is called triboluminescence, and arises by charge separation created by the mechanical [...]