Stories by Graham P. Collins

Projects in Profusion: A Skeptical Look at 3 Wild Fusion-Energy Schemes

Venture capitalists and funding agencies aim to get some bang for their alternative fusion bucks, but a lot of unknowns remain

7 Radical Energy Solutions

The failure rate may be 90 percent, but if any of these exotic technologies succeeds, it could significantly improve energy security and efficiency

Solving the Cocktail Party Problem

Computers have great trouble deciphering voices that are speaking simultaneously. That may soon change

Ultrafast Electron Microscopy

The movies don't have nearly as much interpersonal drama as Avatar , but in these the actors are nanoscopic, directed by the laws of physics operating at the nanoscale.

Blindsight: Seeing without Knowing It

Is it possible to see something without knowing you can see it? Maybe that's not so hard to imagine if you think of subliminal images flashed for a frame or two on a movie screen—too quickly for you to see consciously but perhaps long enough to add a frisson of fear...

Coriolis Effect

The earth's spin influences hurricanes but not toilets

Tectonic Plates

The long, strange trip of continental drift

Origins: The Start of Everything

Where do rainbows come from? What about flying cars, love and LSD?

Stephen Hawking receives Presidential Medal of Freedom

Stephen Hawking was among the recipients at the White House today when President Barack Obama presented the National Medal of Freedom to 16 “agents of change.” Relatively few scientists win this medal, the highest civilian honor awarded in the U.S., particularly when the science is as removed from everyday life as the theoretical physics of black holes...

An Iron Key to High-Temperature Superconductivity?

The discovery that compounds known as iron pnictides can superconduct at 50 degrees above absolute zero has reignited physicists' quest for better high-temperature superconductors, and may offer clues to unlocking a 20-year mystery...

Seeing beyond the diffraction limit in 3-D

PITTSBURGH—At a meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) here this past week, physical chemist W. E. Moerner of Stanford University presented a clever new trick for looking inside living cells...

Signs of a supersolid at the March APS meeting

PITTSBURGH—Look in that lab: it's a gas, it's a solid, it's a superfluid—it's SuperSolid! Well, maybe.

The "it" in question is a collection of rubidium atoms cooled to within a whisker of absolute zero and the lab is physicist Dan Stamper-Kurn's at the University of California, Berkeley...

Within Any Possible Universe, No Intellect Can Ever Know It All

A mathematical theory places limits on how much a physical entity can know about the past, present or future

Did Garrett Lisi Have a Wipeout?

A hyped theory of everything sinks from sight

E8: Exceptional Complexity

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

Yes, the earth moved for me...

I slept through this morning's Midwest quake, but I sure felt this aftershock an hour ago: That's a seismograph in West Lafayette, IN. The online image gets updated every 10 minutes...

Remembering Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

Graham Collins reflects on meeting the famous author in New York City

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 1917–2008

He wore pajamas and a bathrobe, and a swollen bare foot was propped up on an ottoman. That was the figure cut by the revered science-fiction author Arthur C.

Wipeout?

A hyped theory of everything sinks from sight