Presented by Eric Charles. A single gamma ray carries millions of times the energy of a single photon of visible light. This means that gamma rays are produced only in the most convulsive environments in the universe – pulsars spinning...
At the center of the Earth, matter is crushed under pressures millions of times higher than we experience here on the surface. Pressures in the cores of stars and giant planets are even more extreme. To understand how the Earth...
The high standard of living we enjoy today is made possible by catalysts – behind-the-scenes agents that promote chemical reactions in the vast majority of industrial processes, including production of fertilizers, gasoline and other essential products. But we have only...
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...
