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This is an illustration of a model of a paradox – they hydrostatic paradox, as demonstrated by Blaise Pascal. The paradox is that the pressure at the bottom of a column of water only depends on the height of the water, not the shape or the volume. Six tons of water and six ounces of water will [...]

PhysOrg gets non-linear with their look at “time reversal” and how we might soon use it:

Imagine a cell phone charger that recharges your phone remotely without even knowing where it is; a device that targets and destroys tumors, wherever they are in the body; or a security field that can disable electronics, even a listening device hiding in [...]

The Atlantic reveals the fluid dynamics of deadly mob disasters that shows how crowds can be so blindly powerful:

“It happens like magic,” says Dirk Helbing, a professor in Zurich, Switzerland, who studies sociology and crowd modeling. “People don’t have to think about it, you don’t need to have legal regulations or policemen to organize the crowd. It just [...]

Scientific American makes me jealous of the physicists at Livermore’s National Ignition Facility, who get to utter orders like, “Now, my assistants! Fire the FUSION LASER!”:

On 15 March, the 192 laser beams of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, fired a record 1.875-megajoule shot into the laser’s target chamber, surpassing its [...]

Yeah, those funky electronic gizmos that sit on your desk and look oh sparkly! and not much else? Science Daily reports that they can turn water into an antibiotic:

University of California, Berkeley, scientists have shown that ionized plasmas like those in neon lights and plasma TVs not only can sterilize water, but make it antimicrobial — able to [...]

BBC reports on three ways scientists are bringing tractor beams into reality:

The $100,000 (£63,000) award will be used to examine three laser-based approaches to do what has until now been the stuff of science fiction.

Several tractor-beam ideas have been published in the scientific literature but none has yet been put to use.

Nasa scientist Paul Stysley says the approach [...]

That’s the gist of this somewhat mournful piece in The Economist regarding America shuttering its largest particle accelerator:

It already looks likely that the successor to the LHC, a device called the International Linear Collider (ILC), will be built in Japan (if it is built at all). Most physicists agree it would be America’s for the asking if Americans [...]

AP is reporting that CERN has made a beam of sub-atomic particles travel faster than the speed of light:

University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden called it “a flying carpet,” something that was too fantastic to be believable.

CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in [...]

University of Glasgow physicists haven’t gone faster than the speed of light… but they have done something almost as remarkable. They’ve slowed light down to the speed of sound:

Prof. Miles Padgett in the Optics Group in the School of Physics & Astronomy, said: “The speed of light is a constant only in vacuum . When light travels through [...]