Last year marked the 270th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod — but it’s more than a relic of history. The Franklin rod remains in use today because the simple design exploits some ...

A powerful laser turned a copper wire into plasma similar to that found in stars, opening up new possibilities for fusion energy.

Over the past few decades, some physicists worldwide have been investigating unusual particle-like magnetic structures known ...

Thomas White is an associate professor in the Department of Physics, and he’s interested in learning about what’s on the inside of planets and the states of matter it exists in. “The easiest question ...

When lasers were invented in the 1960s, they opened new avenues for scientific discovery and everyday applications, from scanners at the grocery store to corrective eye surgery. Conventional lasers ...

A group of scientists created "slits" in time, allowing them to send light through the slits in a twist on an experiment first run over 200 years ago. In the original experiment, scientists sent light ...

Researchers have developed, for the first time in the world, incoherent dielectric tensor tomography (iDTT), a technology ...

A large part of the analog world is focused on sensors and their related interface circuitry. In many cases, the physical variable to be sensed is obvious, such as temperature, pressure, vibration, ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American It wasn’t so long ago that I was in graduate ...

Cutting grass with lasers works great in a test setup. (Credit: Allen Pan, YouTube) Wouldn’t it be cool if you could cut the grass with lasers? Everyone knows that lasers are basically magic, and if ...