AceNik's Portal

Did you hear about the one with the long-bearded Charlton Heston-lookalike who chats with flaming bushes and uses his big honking stick to part the waters of entire seas? Well, scientists have found how the water-parting may actually have happened.

An undergraduate computer science student has created a “quantum chess” game that stumps computers’ ability to search all possible outcomes of possible moves by having chess pieces mimic particles that are subject to quantum mechanics.

The chess pieces follow the principle of superposition: they can exist in multiple states until you try to move them (or in the case of quantum physics, until you try to measure a particle’s position or momentum).

The uncertainty principle is at the foundation of quantum mechanics: You can measure a particle’s position or its velocity, but not both. Now it seems that quantum computer memory could let us violate this rule.

The theoretical underpinnings of the uncertainty principle are, like most things to do with quantum mechanics, extremely difficult to follow and require a minimum of six degrees to really understand, but the great physicist Paul Dirac provided a more concrete illustration of what the uncertainty principle means.

Putting the right kind of strain on a patch of graphene can make super-strong pseudo-magnetic fields, a new study says. The finding sheds new light on the properties of electromagnetism, not to mention the odd properties of graphene.

Iron cobalt was the most magnetic material on Earth until physicists created what’s in this man’s hands. It’s an iron and nitrogen compound which is 18 percent more magnetic and potentially disproves theories about how magnetic a material can be.