When will your elevator arrive? Two physicists do the math

The human world is, increasingly, an urban one—and that means elevators. Hong Kong, the hometown of physicist Zhijie Feng (Boston University), adds new elevators at the rate of roughly 1500 every year...making vertical ...

Catching fast changes in excited molecules

It's hard to see certain molecules react. The reaction is just that fast. Until now. A team of scientists devised a way to reveal time- and energy-resolved information on "dark" states of molecules—ones that are normally ...

Amazon forest can be trained by higher rainfall variability

The Amazon rainforest has evolved over millions of years and even through ice ages. Yet today, human influences and global climate change put this huge ecosystem at risk of large-scale dieback—with major consequences for ...

How molecules interact with a laser field

When molecules interact with the oscillating field of a laser, an instantaneous, time-dependent dipole is induced. This very general effect underlies diverse physical phenomena such as optical tweezers, for which Arthur Ashkin ...

Predicting the extent of flash flooding

Devastating floodwaters such as those experienced during Iowa's Flood of 2008—which swamped many Iowa communities, along with ten square miles of Cedar Rapids—are notoriously difficult to predict.

Nonlinear light-generating zero-index metamaterial created

(Phys.org) —The Information Age will get a major upgrade with the arrival of quantum processors many times faster and more powerful than today's supercomputers. For the benefits of this new Information Age 2.0 to be fully ...

Chasing the black holes of the ocean

According to researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Miami, some of the largest ocean eddies on Earth are mathematically equivalent to the mysterious black holes of space. These eddies are so tightly shielded by ...

Unraveling genetic networks

If genes are the currency of life, then the whole economies are genetic networks, which include genes as well as the complex webs of interactions and interconnections between them. Genetic networks are integrally important ...

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