Heat is not supposed to behave like this. In everyday life, warmth seeps and diffuses, spreading from hot to cold in a slow, smearing process that never looks anything like a crisp sound wave. Yet ...

A quiet revolution is taking shape in the world of physics, and it doesn’t rely on exotic particles or massive particle colliders. Instead, it begins with something much more familiar—sound.

Scientists have discovered the fastest possible speed of sound. A research collaboration between Queen Mary University of London, the University of Cambridge and the Institute for High Pressure ...

Although few people ever get the chance to travel at the speed of sound, it is an alluring flight goal and an impressive technological feat. Though average people have flown at high speeds on ...

The terahertz quantum cascade laser on its mounting. Credit: University of Leeds Lasers that switch on and off billions of times per second are the backbone of optical communications networks, but ...

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 ...

As an airplane flies faster than the speed of sound, it "pushes" on the sound waves in front of it. But sound waves obey the speed limit—they can't travel faster than the speed of sound. So the waves ...

A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has discovered a new type of sound wave: the airborne sound wave vibrates transversely and carries both rotation and orbital angular momentum ...

On Mars, the speed of sound depends on its pitch. All sound travels slower through Mars’ air compared with Earth’s. But the higher-pitched clacks of a laser zapping rocks travels slightly faster in ...

Helium leaks are hard to detect, since it is odorless, colorless, tasteless, and does not react with other chemical substances. In Applied Physics Letters, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Nanjing ...