Category: Physics

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Credit: Marvel Studios Whether you need a new villain or an old Spider-Man, your sci-fi movie will sound more scientifically credible if you use the word multiverse. The Marvel multiverse puts multiple different versions of our universe “out there,” somewhere. In these films, with the right blend of…

The spider kept a “film” of air over its entire body. The researchers suspect that the fuzzy hairs that cover its body help it to maintain this film of air. Credit: Lindsey Swierk A tropical spider species uses a “film” of air to hide underwater from predators for as long as 30 minutes, according to…

For centuries, black holes were merely theoretically speculative ideas. This tiny sliver of the GOODS-N deep field, imaged with many observatories including Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, XMM-Newton, Herschel, the VLT and more, contains a seemingly unremarkable red dot. That object, a quasar-galaxy hybrid from just 730 million years after the Big Bang, may be key to…

A hole 22 meters in diameter near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Atacama Desert, at an elevation of 18,400 feet stands ready for the cement foundation on which the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope will one day rest. Credit: Cornell University An enormous hole 22 meters in diameter has been dug near the summit…

Girls and boys achieve similar results in physics. Credit: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock “From my own knowledge of these things, physics is not something that girls tend to fancy. They don’t want to do it … There’s a lot of hard math in there that I think that they would rather not do,” Katharine Birbalsingh, chair…

Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory The new facility, LCLS-II, will soon sharpen our view of how nature works on ultrasmall, ultrafast scales, impacting everything from quantum devices to clean energy. Nestled 30 feet underground in Menlo Park, California, a half-mile-long stretch of tunnel is now colder than most of the universe. It houses a new…

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images You’ve got yourself a fancy new spaceship and you want to start on a five-year tour of the galaxy. But there’s a problem: Space is big. Really big. And even at the fastest speeds imaginable, it takes eons of crawling across the interstellar voids to get anywhere interesting. The solution?…

Irvine, Calif., May 11, 2022 — Before his tragic death in 2019, José Flores-Velázquez was a brilliant astrophysics Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. In his memory of him, UCI professor Virginia Trimble, School of Physical Sciences dean James Bullock (who was Flores-Velázquez’s advisor) and longtime…