Physics

Although soft-bodied robots can be simple devices, they typically require onboard electronics to control their locomotion. Such is not the case with a new bot, however, which utilizes a phenomenon of physics to automatically move its inflatable legs.

Using machine learning, a team of researchers in Canada has created ultrahigh-strength carbon nanolattices, resulting in a material that's as strong as carbon steel, but only as dense as Styrofoam.

After decades of physics-based theorizing, researchers have succeeded in creating a novel optical metamaterial using conventional materials. Its enhanced electromagnetic effect may make true one-way glass a reality and solar panels more efficient.

Causality is key to our experience of reality: dropping a glass, for example, causes it to smash, so it can’t smash before it’s dropped. But scientists have now demonstrated how that understanding of time can be violated to charge a quantum battery.

Using paired smartphones, motion-capture app OpenCap films video and then uses AI to analyse human movement, providing detailed data for use in rehabilitation, presurgery plans and disease diagnostics – and is 1% of the cost of traditional technology.

Smart textiles and patches are the near future of home health monitoring. The latest in this burgeoning field of medical therapies is one that impressively keeps an eye on your muscles in real time, helping with both injury recovery and prevention.

Using just a few hundred identical atoms, physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have pieced together the world’s lightest mirror, which is invisible to the naked eye and has a surface measured in mere microns.

Refrigeration and air conditioning could use a boost in efficiency. On that road, researchers have now developed an unusual new technique that could lead to "twist fridges", which cool by unraveling fibers that are tensely twisted.

Heat loss is wasted energy. If we're to successfully create smaller, more efficient technology, then the thermal energy that our gadgets waste needs to be put to better use. This new device, which works at the nanoscale where the theoretical "blackbody limit" falls apart, could be the answer.

Nuclear fusion could be an essentially unlimited energy source, but large eruptions in the plasma can damage reactors. But now physicists have found a way to prevent those large eruptions, by triggering lots of small ones through the injection of tiny pellets of beryllium.

​Open source hardware and software company Arduino has teamed up with Google to develop and launch the Arduino Science Kit Physics Lab. Designed for students aged 11 to 14, the kit helps kids experiment with forces, motion, magnetism and conductivity.​

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who passed away in March, is set to be interred in Westminster Abbey in June. In a final show of the man’s wit and dedication to the weirder realms of physics, it seems that time travelers are on the guest list.