kinetic energy

Cosmic rays are particles that race across our Galaxy at enormous speeds. Their energies can be millions of times higher than those of particles in the most powerful accelerator on Earth. But the higher the energy, the fewer such particles there are: the plot of their numbers shows a noticeable kink, which is called the knee.

The Kerr-NUT black hole is not just a cosmic vacuum cleaner. It's a solution to Einstein's equations where the hole has mass, rotation, and a strange NUT parameter. This parameter behaves like a magnetic charge for gravity: seemingly invisible, yet it alters the properties of surrounding space.

Inside every cell, logistics is in full swing: tiny protein motors, like couriers, haul cargo along a network of microtubules. One of the main workhorses is kinesin, which steps using the energy of ATP (the cell's main energy currency). For a long time, researchers tried to evaluate it like a car: how much fuel it burns, how fast it gets there.

In 1905, Einstein showed that the chaotic motion of pollen in water results from the jostling of invisible molecules. A century later, physicists have learned not only to observe but also to control motion at the quantum level.

Right after the Big Bang, space was a hot plasma — a mix of charged particles and light. In such a medium, electric currents couldn't flow on their own: a 'potential difference' was needed to push electrons relative to photons.

A thin crack runs through glass. At first glance, the fracture line simply reflects the material's brittleness. But if you zoom in to the atomic level, the picture gets more complex: glass starts to resist differently when the crack accelerates.

Sugar dissolves in tea, and then with a single motion gathers back into the spoon. In an ordinary kitchen, you won't see that — viscosity and disorder get in the way. But in the world of ultra-slow motions, where inertia vanishes, such tricks become reality.

An electron flying through a gas is like a swimmer trying to cross a crowded pool. Each collision with an atom changes its course and speed. In dense argon gas, there are so many collisions that a simple description no longer works. Physicists measured electron mobility — how easily electrons drift under an electric field.

Plasma is a gas in which electrons are stripped from atoms, behaving like a soup of charged particles. To predict how such a soup flows and heats up, you need to know how particles collide and exchange energy.

A handful of sand on a vibrating table is like a crowd on a dance floor that still holds the rhythm of the old song for a second after the DJ has switched to a new one. Scientists made a thin layer of grains bounce on a vertically shaking platform and abruptly changed the shaking intensity.