Are your stereo’s woofers and tweeters not getting along? Physics to the rescue! Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the U.K. have developed a way to find “dead spots” in front of loudspeakers. Dead spots result from destructive interference from the output of two different speakers, whether from two separate speaker units or [...]

A group of physicists has built what may be the world’s gentlest cannon, a device that pushes tiny particles along using laser light at about a hundredth the walking speed of the average human. The researchers described their experimental setup in a paper published in the September 10 issue of Physical Review Letters. The device [...]

Theft, imitation and outright deception can make a painting’s history even murkier than centuries of accumulated grime. But getting to the bottom of a piece of art’s origins can be crucial for restoration—and forensics. In recent decades, art scholars, restorers and forensic specialists have relied increasingly on scientific techniques to determine the chemical composition of [...]

The heart’s electrical pulse has made possible the modern-day pacemaker, a device that has helped keep millions of human hearts beating. Such invasive devices, however, have proved difficult to use on small, delicate embryonic animal hearts, which some researchers study to learn more about the early stages of heart development, as well as to develop [...]

The elusive goal of observing chemistry in action at the atomic level just took a quantum leap forward. Physicists using laser pulses have been able to observe for the first time—in real time—the outermost electrons of krypton atoms. As you may recall from high school chemistry it is these electrons that allow basic bonds to [...]