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Washington State University (WSU) physicists have found a way to write an electrical circuit into a crystal, opening up the possibility of transparent, three-dimensional electronics that, like an Etch A Sketch, can be erased and reconfigured.

Ordinarily, a crystal does not conduct electricity. But when the researchers heated up crystal strontium titanate under the specific conditions, the crystal was altered so that light made it conductive. The circuit could be erased by heating it with an optical pen.

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The mystery of strange little glass baubles that show both remarkable strength and fragility has finally been solved.

Language patterns could be predicted by simple laws of physics, a new study has found.

Dr James Burridge from the University of Portsmouth has published a theory using ideas from physics to predict where and how dialects occur.

He said: “If you want to know where you’ll find dialects and why, a lot can be predicted from the physics of bubbles and our tendency to copy others around us.

Schools give grades, and jobs give promotions. But how can the performance of a civilization as a whole be measured? That escalated quickly, we know. When you enter the realm of theoretical physics and start talking about the Kardashev Scale, that’ll happen.

Credit: What The Physics?!

Fascinating article.

The team that discovered gravitational waves put their data online. Now an independent group of researchers claims that they’ve found what might be a serious problem.

Our ultimate user’s guide to fundamental physics – all on one spectacular poster for you to download for free.

Download the poster as a PDF file.

The grand theory of almost everything actually represents a collection of several mathematical models that proved to be timeless interpretations of the laws of physics.

Here is a brief tour of the topics covered in this gargantuan equation.

This version of the Standard Model is written in the Lagrangian form. The Lagrangian is a fancy way of writing an equation to determine the state of a changing system and explain the maximum possible energy the system can maintain.

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Deep learning has transformed the field of artificial intelligence, but the limitations of conventional computer hardware are already hindering progress. Researchers at MIT think their new “nanophotonic” processor could be the answer by carrying out deep learning at the speed of light.

In the 1980s, scientists and engineers hailed optical computing as the next great revolution in information technology, but it turned out that bulky components like fiber optic cables and lenses didn’t make for particularly robust or compact computers.

In particular, they found it extremely challenging to make scalable optical logic gates, and therefore impractical to make general optical computers, according to MIT physics post-doc Yichen Shen. One thing light is good at, though, is multiplying matrices—arrays of numbers arranged in columns and rows. You can actually mathematically explain the way a lens acts on a beam of light in terms of matrix multiplications.

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