Science

1257 Articles

Close-Up Look Reveals That Raindrops Are More Erosive Than Assumed

January 5, 2026 by 17 Comments

Whenever it rains, people generally don’t look too closely at what the drops do exactly when they hit a surface. We generally assume that stuff will get wet and depending on the slope of the surface it’ll run off downhill at some point, probably in a nice, neat flow. Of course, reality doesn’t work that way, as Swiss researchers recently found when they pointed high-speed cameras at simulated raindrops. Their findings were published recently in Applied Physical Sciences, which is sadly paywalled, but the summary article over at phys.org provides some details, including a video.

The researchers set up a 1.2 meter long dry silicate sand surface with a 30° slope on which the drops were released. In the top image you can see two stills of the result, with the full video showing the drops turning into either peanut- or doughnut-shaped forms that gathered significant amounts of sand grains. These grains mix with the water, allowing a single drop to erode significant amounts of material from a slope, more than was previously assumed in existing soil erosion models.

Beyond erosion, these findings also offer insights for similar dynamics in other fields, all thanks to a group of researchers who got curious during a rainy walk and decided to take a closer look.

Illustration of Chladni's technique for producing his figures, from John Tyndall's Sound (1869)

Popular Science Experiments In Sound During The 19th-Century

January 5, 2026 by 9 Comments

Check one, two; check one, two; is this thing on? Over on The Public Domain Review [Lucas Thompson] takes us for a spin through sound, as it was in Britain around and through the 1800s.

The article begins by introducing the Father of Acoustics, German physicist Ernst Chladni. After placing grains of sand on a thin metal plate and drawing a violin bow along one edge Chladni figures appear, making manifest that which previously could only be heard, that is, sound waves.

It’s fun to think that it wasn’t so long ago that the physics of sound was avant-garde. Middle class Victorian society was encouraged to reproduce cutting edge experiments with equipment in their own homes, participating in a popular science which was at the same time part entertainment and part instruction, for young and old alike. Throughout the rest of his article [Lucas] lists a number of popular science books from the period and talks a little about what was to be found within.

See the video below the break for a demonstration of Chladni figures from The Royal Institution. Of course the present state of the art regarding sonics is well advanced as compared with that of the 19th century. If you’re interested to know more check out Building A Wall-Mounted Sound Visualizer and Seeing Sound For Under $200.

Continue reading “Popular Science Experiments In Sound During The 19th-Century” →

Virus-Based Thermoresponsive Separation Of Rare-Earth Elements

December 31, 2025 by 9 Comments

Although rare-earth elements (REEs) are not very rare, their recovery and purification is very cumbersome, with no significant concentrations that would help with mining. This does contribute to limiting their availability, but there might be more efficient ways to recover these REEs. One such method involves the use of a bacteriophage that has been genetically modified to bind to specific REEs and release them based on thermal conditions.

The primary research article in Nano Letters is sadly paywalled, but the supporting information PDF gives some details. We can also look at the preceding article (full PDF) by [Inseok Chae] et al. in Nano Letters from 2024, in which they cover the binding part using a lanthanide-binding peptide (LBP) that was adapted from Methylobacterium extorquens.

With the new research an elastin-like peptide (ELP) was added that has thermoresponsive responsive properties, allowing the triggering of coacervation after the phages have had some time in the aqueous REE containing solution. The resulting slurry makes it fairly easy to separate the phages from the collected REE ions, with the phages ready for another cycle afterwards. Creating more of these modified phages is also straightforward, with the papers showing the infecting of E. coli to multiply the phages.

Whether the recovery rate and ability to scale makes it an economically feasible method of REE recovery remains to be seen, but it’s definitely another fascinating use of existing biology for new purposes.

Photographing Cosmic Rays With A Consumer Camera

December 28, 2025 by 18 Comments

The reason photographic darkrooms are needed is because almost any amount of light can ruin the film or the photographic paper before they are fixed. Until then these things are generally kept in sealed, light-proof containers until they are ready to be developed. But there are a few things that can ruin film even then, most notably because some types of film are sensitive to ionizing radiation as well as light. This was famously how [Henri Becquerel] discovered that uranium is radioactive, but the same effect can be used to take pictures of cosmic rays.

In [Becquerel]’s case, a plate of photographic material was essentially contaminated from uranium by accident, even though the plate was in a completely dark area otherwise. Cosmic rays are similar to this type of radiation in that they are also ionizing and will penetrate various materials even in places we might otherwise think of as dark. For this artistic and scientific experiment, [Gabriel] set up a medium-format digital camera in a completely dark room and set it to take a 41-minute exposure. The results are fairly impressive and are similar to [Becquerel]’s experiment except that [Gabriel] expected to see something whereas the elder scientist was more surprised.

Like cosmic rays or radiation from uranium, there is a lot flying around that is invisible to the human eye but that can be seen with the right equipment and some effort. Although [Gabriel] is using a camera with a fairly large sensor that we might not all have access to, in theory this could work with more off-the-shelf digital photography equipment or even film cameras. A while ago we even saw a build that used UV to see other invisible phenomena like electrical arcing.

What To Do When Your Foucault Pendulum Stops Swinging

December 27, 2025 by 41 Comments

At the Houston Museum of Natural Science they recently made a disturbing discovery: their Foucault pendulum had stopped swinging for the first time since its installation in the 1970s. (Video, embedded below.)

While some might take this as yet another sign of the end times, here it is simply a sign that the electromagnetic system that kicks the pendulum developed a fault and will need to be fixed.

Their explainer video of this Herzstein Foucault pendulum is also worth watching, as it explains both the underlying physics and this particular pendulum’s construction. Every 48 hours the 81.6 kg heavy pendulum completes a full rotation, like clockwork, with pins along the circumference being tipped over one by one as the pendulum precesses.

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A red and blue visualization of the waves from a small ultrasonic speaker

Seeing Sound For Under $200

December 27, 2025 by 2 Comments

There are five general senses: touch for feels, taste for food, smell for avoiding trash, hearing for sounds, and, of course, eyesight for visualizing the very waves making up that sound. [PlasmatronX] drives that last point home with his camera for sound waves, that’s even able to capture constructive and destructive interference. (Video, embedded below.)

You may have heard of Schlieren imaging, which is usually used to capture the movement of air currents caused by heat sources. [PlasmatronX] sets up a concave mirror to amplify the refraction of different densities of air, only unlike traditional Schlieren setups, he’s after the different densities of air caused by the pressure waves that we interpret as sound.

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Simulating Driven-Dissipative Quantum Spin Dynamics On Consumer Hardware

December 26, 2025 by 5 Comments

Physics simulations using classical mechanics is something that’s fairly easily done on regular consumer hardware, with real-time approximations a common feature in video games. Moving things to the quantum realm gets more complex, though with equilibrium many-body systems still quite solvable. Where things get interesting is with nonequilibrium quantum systems.

These open systems are subject to energy gains and losses that disrupt its equilibrium. The truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) is used as a semi-classical method to solve these, but dissipative spin systems proved tricky. Now however [Hosseinabadi] et al. have put forward a TWA framework (PR article) for driven-dissipative many-body dynamics that works on consumer hardware.

Naturally, even with such optimizations there is still the issue that the TWA is only an approximation. This raises questions such as about how many interactions are required to get a sufficient level of accuracy.

Using classical computers to do these kind of quantum physics simulations has often been claimed to the ideal use of qubit-based quantum computers, but as has been proven repeatedly, you can get by with a regular tensor network or even a Commodore 64 if you’re in a pinch.