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 ...

Sound is usually treated as the most familiar of physical phenomena, the background noise of daily life rather than a ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Engineers at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de ...

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 ...

“Second sound is the hallmark of superfluidity, but in ultracold gases so far you could only see it in this faint reflection ...

A team of scientists has succeeded in cooling traveling sound waves in wave-guides considerably further than has previously been possible using laser light. This achievement represents a significant ...

Look at that mountain! Imagine you are standing at the base of a volcano looking up. You were told that the volcano isn’t going to erupt anytime soon, but you notice a little bit of smoke (or is that ...

Sound needs a medium (solid, liquid, or gas) to travel. Space is a vacuum, lacking the matter to carry sound waves. No sound in space means no echoes. While a near-perfect vacuum, some sounds can be ...

It’s a question I’m sure was keeping you up at night: can you make an object spin with a sound wave? The answer, generally speaking, used to be no. Now, though, mechanical engineers have taken a look ...

Determining the "loudest recorded sound" depends on how you define sound and on which measurements you choose to include.

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation. Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to ...

The earliest scientists first observed the waves that earthquakes produce before they could accurately describe the nature of earthquakes or their fundamental causes, as discussed in Lessons 1–5.