科普物理
The fact that the nucleus is lighter than its constituents, seems rather strange. How can the whole have a smaller mass than its components? To get some intuition about how this is possible, one can look at a simpler more familiar system…
We model the instantaneous power applied by a cyclist on a velodrome -- for individual pursuits and other individual time trials -- taking into account its straights, circular arcs, and connecting transition curves. The forces opposing the…
The 1908 Tunguska event is used to be associated with a forestfall named after its first scientific researcher -- Leonid Kulik.However association of the Kulikovskii forestfall with the events in the morning of June 30, 1908 is based only…
In the present study, we analyze in combination the principles of special relativity and the phenomenon of the aberration of light, deriving a system of equations that allows establishing the relationship between the angles commonly…
This is a translation of an article written originally in Portuguese for the journal Gazeta de F\'isica, in a special edition celebrating the 2020 Nobel prize in physics. The text targets a broad audience and focuses on the key ideas and…
The evolution of the fireball resulting from the August 2020 Beirut explosion is traced using amateur footage taken during the first $\sim$ 230 $ms$ after the detonation. 38 frames separated by $\sim$ 16.66 - 33.33 $ms$ are extracted from 6…
Energy system models for long-term planning are widely used to explore the future electricity system. Typically, to represent the future electricity demand in these models, historical demand profiles are used directly or scaled up linearly.…
For effective planning and management of water resources and implementation of the related strategies, it is important to ensure proper estimation of evaporation losses, especially in regions that are prone to drought. Changes in climatic…
In the present paper we consider the Type-2.x and Type-3.x extraterrestrial von-Neumann probes and study the problem of their detectability by the world's largest radio telescope: the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope…
One of the most thrilling features of Physics is the possibility to establish analogies between apparently distant areas. Here we explain the parallel between a pile of grains interacting mechanically with each other, and a "pile" of…
The Newcomb-Benford law, also known as the first-digit law, gives the probability distribution associated with the first digit of a dataset, so that, for example, the first significant digit has a probability of $30.1$ % of being $1$ and…
Self-replicating probes are spacecraft with the capacity to create copies of themselves. Self-replication would potentially allow for an exponential increase in the number of probes and thereby drastically improve the efficiency of space…
What is the chance we start a conversation with another civilization like our own? Our technological society produced signals that could be received by other extraterrestrial civilizations, within a sphere around us with a radius of $\sim…
A view on the history and current status of dark matter and dark energy, at a fairly introductory level.
A foundational model has been developed based on trends built from empirical data of space exploration and computing power through the first six plus decades of the Space Age which projects earliest possible launch dates for human-crewed…
It is demonstrated that the development of a nuclear fusion rocket engine based on a D $-$ $^{3}$He (Deterium-Helium 3) technology will allow to travel in the solar system and beyond. The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) is the D $-$…
We present an overview of the art project Aganta Kairos (To Fish the Metaphysical Time). This project celebrates the neutrino, the ghost particle, which scientists consider a cosmic messenger and the artist regards as a link between people…
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a research activity that started in the late 1950s, predating the arrival of "Big History" and "Astrobiology" by several decades. Many elements first developed as part of the original…
There are two puzzles surrounding the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. First, why are the mythological stories surrounding them, typically involving seven young girls being chased by a man associated with the constellation Orion, so similar in…
The standard model of modern cosmology provides a description of a wide range of astrophysical and astronomical data. However, despite this impressive success, several discrepancies have have persisted. Most strikingly, the emerging tension…