Shortly after the birth of the universe, space was filled by a plasma that was literally red-hot. The light radiated by that plasma has traveled the vast emptiness of space for billions of years, with the expansion of the universe...
It would have been hard to predict Google, Facebook and Twitter as results of the creation of the first transistor out of a chunk of silicon. Only when looking back do we see ages of stone and iron, technological revolutions...
On September 14, 2015, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) made the first direct measurement of a gravitational wave coming from deep space. That wave was generated by the collision of two black holes about 1.3 billion light-years from...
Developing cheaper and more efficient devices to harvest energy from the sun is a major scientific challenge. One way to increase the efficiency of solar cells – and even make solar cells out of otherwise inactive materials – is by...
The distribution of galaxies in the universe is patchy. Galaxies are bound together in clusters made of stars, hot gas and invisible dark matter. These galaxy clusters are part of a cosmic web of filaments, nodes and empty voids that...
Dark matter is one of the most mysterious components of the universe. Yet it makes up 23 percent of the mass of the universe – six times the mass of ordinary, atomic matter. Physicists have never observed dark matter particles...
Imagine taking a ball of hot plasma more massive than the sun and suddenly compressing it to a super-dense object the size of a city. This sounds like science fiction, yet it is exactly what happens in the centers of...
Batteries are needed everywhere, for consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and large-scale energy storage on the electrical grid. All of these applications are limited by the capacity, lifetime and safety of current battery technologies. This lecture discusses new chemistries and materials...
In less than two decades, scientists have discovered more than a thousand planets orbiting other stars. Now we know that our solar system is not alone -- but we still do not know if it is rare or unique. Most...
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant particle accelerator at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will restart operations in 2015, at higher energies and intensities than ever before.
From social media to market analysis, people use pattern recognition and machine learning to sift through enormous amounts of data and reach new levels of understanding. Now scientists are using those same tools to track millions of individual molecules as...
Presented by Debbie Bard. One of the most surprising predictions made by Einstein's theory of relativity is that light doesn't travel through the universe in a straight line. The gravitational field of massive objects will deflect the path of light...
