In order for a fire to sustain itself, it needs three things: fuel, heat, and oxygen, with the disruption of just one of those causing the fire to extinguish. Water, sand, and carbon dioxide-based ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. We live our entire lives surrounded by them. They slam into us ...

Sound needs a medium (solid, liquid, or gas) to travel. Space is a vacuum, lacking the matter to carry sound waves. No sound in space means no echoes. While a near-perfect vacuum, some sounds can be ...

Sound waves traveling thousands of kilometers through the ocean may help scientists monitor climate change. As greenhouse gas emissions warm the planet, the ocean is absorbing vast amounts of that ...

Optical neural networks may provide the high-speed and large-capacity solution necessary to tackle challenging computing tasks. However, tapping their full potential will require further advances. One ...

At the start of my career, I used to do acoustic testing in an anechoic chamber where sound is not reflected as it gets absorbed. But the quietness of these chambers always got me thinking of how ...

Look at that mountain! Imagine you are standing at the base of a volcano looking up. You were told that the volcano isn’t going to erupt anytime soon, but you notice a little bit of smoke (or is that ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Engineers at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. What if you could listen to music or a podcast without headphones or earbuds and without ...

It’s a question I’m sure was keeping you up at night: can you make an object spin with a sound wave? The answer, generally speaking, used to be no. Now, though, mechanical engineers have taken a look ...