Year after year, three people descend to the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, France, to check that the standard kilogram by which all other weights are measured is still intact. But between 1946 and 1989, this international benchmark for heaviness has lost 0.00005 grams. And nobody knows why

MARCH 1ST, 2011

Good things come in small packages: in the general trend towards miniaturization, our ancestors’ wisdom seems to be the leitmotiv of modern technology.

7 june 2010

Giorgio Volpe, Physics

Some of the coldest temperatures on record have recently been measured, as recently reported by the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. Today, ultra-cold physics is a hugely popular field of research because such low temperatures not only allow one to directly see quantum physics, but also because there are experimental tools to manipulate these particles. In this way, it is now possible to study problems experimentally, something which was deemed totally impossible only a few years ago.

10 may 2010

Armand Niederberger, Physics

There are some invisible worlds – worlds that have been disclosed to us only by the technological advances of the last decades. Surprisingly, various species of shrimps where already there!

12 March 2010

Giovanni Volpe, Physics