physics

We have been wondering for 4,500 years why the Great Pyramid of Giza resists earthquakes. Physics finally has the answer

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Throughout its more than 4,500 years of history, the Great Pyramid of Gizathe tomb of Pharaoh Cheops, has witnessed the rise and fall of empires, the erosion of the desert and also the earthquakes in an area with very intense seismic activity. This is crucial, because while the Alexandria Lighthouse or the Colossus of Rhodes succumbed to the Earth’s tremors, the 138-meter-high mass has remained immovable. The secrets Their longevity has been a topic of conversation for decades among Egyptologists, engineers and architects who tried to understand why they were still standing. And it is logical, because every physical object has a “natural frequency” of vibration, and this is crucial because when the seismic waves of an earthquake coincide with the frequency of an object, a very important amplification effect is produced. It is an effect that we can see, for example, on a swing, since we push it at the exact moment so that it goes higher and higher. And this is where the “superpower” of the Great Pyramid lies. What does it consist of? According to a study published in Scientific Reports, the pyramid and the ground on which it sits dance to completely different rhythms. This means that the pyramid has a natural vibration frequency which is around 2.3 Hz. For its part, the surrounding terrain of the Giza Plateau vibrates at a drastically lower frequency, close to 0.6 Hz. This mathematical gap is a true structural lifesaver, since, since there is no coincidence between the frequency of the stone mass and that of the ground during a seismic event, resonance is practically impossible. Waves from the earthquake pass through the area, but the pyramid does not amplify the vibration, dispelling the danger of a catastrophic collapse. It is, in modern terms, perfect passive seismic isolation behavior. Extreme geometry. This frequency decoupling is one part of the equation, since the focus is also on the impeccable architectural design and geometric of construction, which provides a uniform structural response to any mechanical stress. All this is thanks to the ingenuity of Egyptian engineers who created an artificial monolith that defies the laws of destruction through several characteristics, such as greatly lowering the center of gravity. And, unlike modern structures that are slender, in pyramids the vast majority of stones are concentrated in their lower third. This makes the building virtually impossible to overturn, regardless of the violence of the transverse shaking. More reasons. The square pyramid shape is not just an aesthetic or religious choice, but it is the most stable geometric figure that exists to withstand compression. Symmetry ensures that when seismic waves shake the building, the load and stress are distributed equally across all faces, avoiding critical fracture points. The internal chambers. One of the details that the investigation has pointed out is the unsuspected role of the famous internal chambers of the pyramidlike the King’s Chamber. Historically, they have been analyzed from a funerary perspective, but it is now suggested that, together with the impressive granite discharge blocks, they also act as a system to dissipate energy. In this way, seismic waves that manage to penetrate the structure encounter abrupt changes in the density of the matter, which causes the waves to refract and disperse. Did they do it on purpose? This is the question we can ask ourselves after reading all this, and the most plausible answer is that the Egyptians did not handle all these technical concepts, but they were absolute masters of empirical engineering. Through observation, trial, error and a deep knowledge of the materials, they arrived at the optimal solution so that they would last for life. They built for eternity based on massive stability and, in doing so, accidentally designed a building that meets the same safety parameters that we demand of our most critical infrastructure today to prevent them from collapsing in an earthquake. Images | Jeremy Bishop In Xataka | What we see in Petra is a city “carved in stone”: what it really hides is an amazing water system

When the fathers of quantum physics discovered the fundamental ideas of reality, they discovered that a Jesuit had already been there 200 years before.

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The story is a classic of popular science: 200 years before the birth of quantum physics, the Jesuit Ruđer Bošković advanced the central ideas of 20th century physics: field theory, the uncertainty principle and even dark energy. Furthermore, he did it alone. What Bošković did, as Héctor Farrés points outit’s incredible. Not only is it real and important, but it is beyond doubt (Heisenberg himself lor recognized in 58), but what he didn’t do too. The latter is, in fact, the most interesting. What Bošković knew. In 1758, the Jesuit (who was one of the great mathematicians of the time and had even helped fix the dome of St. Peter’s) published in Vienna ‘Philosophiae naturalis theoria redacts ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium‘. In this book he developed ideas that he had already presented almost 15 years earlier in Rome: that matter was not made of extended solid corpuscles (as Newtonian physics maintained), nor of inextended metaphysical monads (as Leibniz thought). For Bošković, matter is essentially composed of dimensionless points that only exist as points of force. In essence, Bošković believed that Newton’s inverse square law was a ‘limiting case’ (for planetary bodies) of a different equation that governed the relationship of all things in nature. Just this idea that scale is important, that the behavior of forces could change radically depending on it, deserves to go down in the history of physics. Because? Because it is the piece that helps us stop understanding matter as impenetrable ‘bodies’ and allows us to understand that impenetrability as an effect: it was giving mathematical entity to atomism. And the most interesting thing is that his later influence is real. It is documented, come on: there is a chain of readings that takes us from these ideas to those of William Rowan Hamiltonthe most direct precursor of quantum mechanics. Apparently, Werner Heisenberg, he of the uncertainty principle, he even said in 1958 that “the remarkable concept that forces are repulsive at small distances and must be attractive at greater distances has played a decisive role in modern atomic physics. (…) Bohr’s quantum theory of the atom can be precisely related to this concept, and the study of the atomic nucleus during the last thirty years has taught us that the particles that constitute the nucleus, protons and neutrons, are bound together by precisely such a force.” However, one should not exaggerate either. As Borges said when talking about Kafka, authors create their own precursors. That is, as Heisenberg himself said, Bošković’s work “contains numerous ideas that have only achieved full expression in modern physics in the last fifty years.” They were brilliant intuitions that are fully understood in the light of quantum physics, but not seeds that logically contained all the physics of the 20th century within them. A very common mistake. Too common, in fact. We don’t usually approach history from what we already know and there, of course, the similarities shine in the middle of the night. The reality is that what we see are usually ‘pareidolias’: things that say more about us and the functioning of our brain than about what happened in the past. Image | Xataka In Xataka | One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century already identified the problem of Generation Z: “Not tolerating boredom”

we have just discovered that it contained a material ‘impossible’ for physics

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In July of last year an academic investigation shook materials physics with an unexpected protagonist: a space rock collected in Germany three centuries ago. Inside it housed a mineral whose thermal behavior does not fit into any known classification. The most disconcerting thing is not the material itself (that too), but that it had been gathering dust in a glass case since 1724: no one had looked at it with the appropriate instruments until now. The meteorite of 1724. Called the “Steinbach meteorite” after the German region of Saxony where it fell. The remains quickly joined museum collections due to their exotic origin and beauty, without attracting special attention from the scientific community. Among them, in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, where the fragment that was used for this research is located. What that fragment contains is meteoric tridymitea form of silicon dioxide extraordinarily rare on Earth. It is a polymorphism of quartz that is only generated under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, conditions that do not occur in ordinary terrestrial geology, but do occur in meteorite impacts or volcanic environments. Why it is important. In a phrase: because of its properties. The tridymite from the Steinbach meteorite maintains a practically constant thermal conductivity between −193 °C and 107 °C (80 and 380 kelvin), something that beyond meaning that it conducts heat the same whether you are in the cold winter of Iceland or in a heat wave in the desert, it has a peculiarity: no known material behaves like this. This thermal stability is a rarity in itself in materials technology and gives it clear applicability for thermal management: it allows designing electronic devices that do not overheat and aerospace insulation systems with an efficiency unthinkable under the laws of classical physics. Context. In 2009 the physicist Michele Simoncelli together with Nicola Marzari and Francesco Mauri developed a unified equation based on the Wigner transport formalism capable of simultaneously describing the thermal behavior of crystals, glasses and any intermediate state. That equation theoretically predicted the existence of materials with temperature-invariant thermal conductivity like this one. The problem is that no one had found that material in the real world. In the universe, most minerals form under Earth’s pressures and temperatures that force atoms to adopt standard crystal lattices. But in the asteroid belt, the remains of distinct protoplanets undergo cooling processes and catastrophic collisions that generate mineral phases that do not exist naturally in the Earth’s crust. Tridymite is common in volcanic rocks, but this one of meteoric origin has the advantage of having been thermally stabilized in space for millions of years. Something doesn’t add up. Until now, science assumed that a solid material must be either a crystal (ordered structure) or a glass (ordered structures) and its thermal properties depended on that structure: the thermal conductivity of a crystal decreases with increasing temperature because the vibrations of the crystalline lattice (the phonons) disperse among themselves with more intensity. Just the opposite happens in glass because its internal disorder facilitates additional ways of transmitting heat when heated. They are opposite trends, robust and well documented experimentally for decades. The Steinbach meteorite breaks the rules and behaves like both at the same time. Steinbach meteoric tridymite has an atomic structure that presents order in the chemical bonds like a crystal and geometric disorder in the arrangement of those bonds like a glass. This combination generates an exact compensation between both transport mechanisms, the propagation mechanism (typical of crystals) and the tunneling mechanism (typical of glass), which is what the research team calls PTI conductivity, propagation-tunneling-invariant. How they discovered it. The discovery it has been possible thanks to thermoreflectometry, which measures variations in the optical reflectivity of a surface when it is thermally excited with a pulsed laser, allowing thermal conductivity to be inferred with high resolution. What they saw was that the silicon atoms were not in perfect rows, but they were not random either: they followed a “middle-range order” sequence that previously only existed in mathematical models, confirming point by point the predictions of the Wigner equation. Yes, but. The Meteoric tridymite is disruptive in materials technology, the problem is reproducibility and scarcity. So far we have only found this material in the Steinbach meteorite, a limited sample of an astronomical milestone that occurred three centuries ago. Obtaining it from meteorites is simply not feasible and the challenge of manufacturing this glass-crystal synthetically is not exactly small. A curiosity: the paper explains that in the Gale crater Martian tridymite has also been detected, raising questions about how it has influenced the geological history of the red planet or opening the possibility of eventual space mining. On the other hand, and although it is true that the material defies the laws of physics, it is important to highlight that we are talking about current physics: it is not that the laws were false, it is that they were simply incomplete. In Xataka | In 2023 an asteroid disintegrated off the coast of Normandy. At that time we were not aware of how lucky we were In Xataka | In 2011, a collector bought a meteorite in Morocco. It has turned out to be direct evidence of thermal water on Mars Cover | Fred Kruijen and Batu Gezer

the reason is the laws of physics

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Surely you already know (online advertising is reminding you day in and day out) that with a simple prompt you can generate a video game. The AI ​​does it for you, but what it can’t do is play it. The reason is not that games are difficult in the abstract: it is that the real world obeys the same physical laws everywhere, and video games do not. Do, not play. The paradox is striking: with tools like Cursor either Claudea prompt generates a clone of a functional classic game. ‘Asteroids’, for example. However, that same system would not even surpass the first level of its own creation. Julian Togelius, director of the Game Innovation Lab at New York University and co-founder of the testing company Modl.ai, has been investigating why for months, and has broken it down in an interview. Programming is not a game. Togelius defines programming from a structural point of view: a very well designed game. Each line of code comes with a clear statement, a verifiable success criterion and feedback on possible failures, and the program indicates exactly where and why it failed. LLMs (language models) have been trained with massive amounts of code and fine-tuned using reinforcement learning to solve exactly those types of problems. Programming is, in terms of task structure, an exceptionally “well-behaved” game, as Togelius defines it. That’s why so many people find programming fun. However, video games are another story: the action space is governed by more arbitrary rules, feedback can be immediate or take hours to arrive, spatial reasoning is essential and the margin of error is much smaller. When an AI model is asked to play something, the result documented in the paper that Togelius made is unequivocal: “absolute failure.” With a guide, please. Gemini 2.5 Pro completed ‘Pokémon Blue’ in May 2025, but it took considerably longer than any human player, made repetitive mistakes, and relied on auxiliary software to achieve it. The TIME magazine analyzed Why the best AI systems still struggle with ‘Pokémon’. And that is one of the few titles that manage to finish. They achieve this because these systems have specific APIs to consult strategic guides. That ‘Pokémon’ or ‘Minecraft’ (another title that AIs can navigate) are two of the most documented franchises in the history of video games, with millions of hours of walkthroughs available on the internet, is the key to making it easier for them. The key is in physics. But… why can a language model write an essay on quantum physics and at the same time fail in both ‘Halo’ and ‘Space Invaders’? Togelius’s response is that “those two games are more different from each other, in a sense, than two different academic essays.” Looked at another way: video games are very heterogeneous. Each one invents their own rules, their own space logic, their own reward system. The mechanics of a platform game are absolutely different from those of a ‘Tetris’. Spatial reasoning (where objects are, how they move, how they relate) does not appear in the pre-training data of the language models because it cannot be understood from one game to the next. However, let’s look at a task seemingly more difficult than playing ‘Super Mario’: driving a self-driving car. And AIs do that well. The difference with games is that the real world obeys the same physical laws anywhere on the planet. The asphalt behaves the same in San Francisco as in Shanghai, the traffic lights follow the same principles, the vehicle always responds the same. As Togelius points out, “driving is much more homogeneous than video games as a whole.” Learn to drive and you can do it anywhere on the planet. Learn how to play ‘Doom’ and you will have no idea how to play ‘Age of Empires’. The definitive criterion. That is why Togelius proposes video games as a criterion to determine the success of an AI: it is necessary to gauge whether an agent capable of learning can complete any game in the top 100 on Steam in approximately the same time as a skilled human player, without access to prior documentation or specific integration. To that scale (which does not require winning on the first try, but rather learning at a human pace) there is no system today that comes close. Header | Photo of Erik Mclean in Unsplash In Xataka | AI entered video games as an experiment. Today more than 80% of developers no longer know how to produce without it

Physics is clear that it is a mistake

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In the middle of winter, a classic dilemma always returns in Spanish homes: is it advisable to leave the heating on all day to avoid the “peak of consumption” when turning it back on or is it better to turn it off every time we go out? For years, fear of an astronomical bill has fueled the myth that “keeping warm” is cheaper. But this winter, experts have decided to settle the issue by relying on an unbeatable ally: the laws of physics. The five minute rule. For Jorge Morales de Labra, industrial engineer and energy analyst, the answer does not allow nuances. As explained in Cadena CopeTurning off the heating is always worth it. In fact, he exemplifies it very simply: “Even if you go down for five minutes to buy bread, it is economically worthwhile to turn it off.” This statement has a solid scientific basis. As Morales de Labra details, heating systems consume energy constantly to compensate for the heat losses that the home suffers through walls, ceilings and windows. If the heating remains on while no one is there, we are paying for a comfort that no one enjoys, forcing the boiler to work tirelessly to counteract the cold outside. So why does shutting down save more than maintaining? The key lies in demystifying the “effort” that the boiler makes when starting. Although it is true that the boiler works more intensely to recover the initial temperature, this specific consumption is much lower than the sustained expenditure to keep the system running during hours of absence. Furthermore, the figures support this thesis. According to data from the OCU (Organization of Consumers and Users)If we decide to turn off the heating completely at night, the savings can skyrocket up to 67%. For their part, energy efficiency studies cited by El Español They estimate that by simply turning off the system for short and moderate absences, a family can reduce their annual bill by 8% to 15%. In an average home, this represents a direct saving of between 50 and 120 euros per year. The “invisible limit” of 21 degrees. Another common mistake is to confuse comfort with excess heat. The Institute for Energy Diversification and Saving (IDAE) warns that Each degree we go above that threshold makes the bill 7% more expensive. The official recommendation is clear: During the day: Between 19 °C and 21 °C is the optimal temperature. At night: Simply keep it between 15°C and 17°C, or turn it off directly. It should be remembered that this rule is universal for radiators and heat pumps. Nevertheless, systems such as underfloor heatingwhich have great thermal inertia and take hours to heat up, require more stable management and do not benefit from shutdowns lasting just minutes. The crucial role of insulation. It’s not all the thermostat’s fault; The reality is that almost half of what we pay depends on the walls. If your house has leaks, heat literally escapes through the cracks, forcing you to turn up the heat to avoid shivering. It is a vicious circle that empties the pocket. Luckily, the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggests several effective patches that do not require getting into work: Seal drafts: Installing weather stripping on doors and windows can save up to 100 euros annually. Blind management: Open them during the day to take advantage of the sun and close them tightly at nightfall to add an extra layer of insulation. Adjust the boiler: It is recommended to lower the boiler delivery temperature (the water that goes to the radiators) to improve the efficiency of the equipment. Smart ventilation: Simply open the windows for a few minutes in the morning to renew the air without the walls getting cold. An investment in control. Savings do not come from being cold, but from managing the heat intelligently. Jorge Morales de Labra emphasizes the importance of smart thermostats. These devices allow programming the heating so that it turns on half an hour before we get home or turn it off from our cell phone if we have forgotten. In short, this winter science gives us permission to turn off the switch. Heating an empty house is not comfort, it is waste. True efficiency is not about generating more heat, but about preventing the heat we have already paid for from escaping. Image | freepik Xataka | Heating has an invisible limit: going over that temperature raises the bill without you noticing more heat

The existence of lightning remains a mystery to atmospheric physics. Austria has given us a clue to solve it

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It seems unbelievable, but in the middle of 2025 one of the most common and violent phenomena of nature continues keeping many secrets. This is the case of raywhich we know how to protect ourselves from and we know that Franklin had very right with your kite. But if we ask an atmospheric physicist what exactly detonates the first spark inside a cloud to start the download, you’ll probably shrug your shoulders. The discovery. We would expect the answer to this classic meteorology question in the sky itself, but in reality it seems to be in a laboratory in Austria. It has been here where they have achieved something that seems like magic: using lasers to trap microscopic particles in the air, and almost by accident, discovering a charging mechanism that could be the ‘missing link’ in the formation of lightning in our sky. What we knew. For lightning to strike, it is necessary that there is a monstrous electric field that breaks the resistance of air, something that has a name: dielectric breakdown. The problem is that when we measure the electric fields inside a thundercloud, the numbers don’t add up: They are too low to initiate lightning on their own. This means that scientists have long suspected that the secret was in the aerosols and ice crystals that collide within a cloud. And the theory is quite clear: if a small particle could accumulate enough charge, then it has the ability to create a micro-electric field around it so intense that it would start a chain reaction. The problem is that studying a microscopic ice grain in the middle of a storm is impossible, since we can be next to it and we cannot lower the cloud to the ground either. That is why this is where this research comes in, which has found a high-tech solution with optical tweezers. The experiment. To find the answer, a 532 nm green laser was used to make lift a silica sphere just a micron in diameter. But… Why? In this case, the initial objective was to measure forces precisely, but they encountered something very strange: the laser itself that held the particle was electrically charging it. Far from being a mistake, they realized that they had in front of them a perfect tool to simulate the atmosphere in miniature. It was no longer necessary to go to a cloud to analyze it. In this way, they began to charge a particle with so much static electricity that it caused a dielectric breakdown in the air around them, discharging themselves suddenly. They had literally created a controlled micro-ray in the laboratory. The authors of the study explicitly suggest that this system is an ideal model to study the electrification of aerosols and clouds. Its importance. Until now, studying these phenomena required getting into a storm-chasing plane or relying on computer simulations. But now we have the ability to simulate these conditions in a controlled way. And it is also ideal to understand why sometimes the sky seems like it is going to break in our own heads. Images | Michael Mancewicz In Xataka | What is a dry storm: when the sky throws lightning, but the rain never reaches the ground

40 years ago three researchers insisted on blurring the borders of quantum physics, today they have won the Nobel

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It was 1935 and Erwin Schrödinger was already tired of reading nonsense. It was not a decade since the birth of modern quantum mechanics, but the world had already filled with delusional pseudophilosophical reflections on what reality really was. It was then that poor Erwin inflated his noses and decided to talk to us about his cat. The happy cat of Schrödinger. Of his cat, of a closed opaque box and, in addition, of a container with a poisonous gas. The container in question is controlled by an opening device that only works if a radioactive particle disintegrates over a certain period of time. After that period, the probability that the cat is dead is 50% and that it is also alive of 50%. “If we do not open the box,” the standard version of this ‘paradox’ tells us, “the cat will be alive and dead at the same time.” Or, in other words, we could be calm: as long as we did not open the box, the cat would not be really dead. According to many interpreters, in fact, it would be the one that opens the box that kills the cat. No one understands poor Erwin. The interesting thing about all this is that, although it has been used to the fed up to illustrate The idea of ​​quantum overlapSchrödinger used it to demonstrate how absurd it was to apply categories of quantum mechanics to the real world (macroscopic). For the Austrian physicist, the happy cat would be alive or dead regardless of the opening of the box or not. But … what if not? However, half a century after all this, there were a group of researchers from the University of Berkeley who did not have it so clear. For some years it was known that we were missing a key piece to understand the process of molecular disintegration. That is, “the ability of individual particles to disintegrate is well known” (this is, for example, the physical fact that there is Behind carbon-14); What happens is that according to what we knew about physics, that could not be. The particles should not disintegrate. Between 1984 and 1985, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis They performed a series of experiments With a closed electrical circuit with superconductors and showed that, well, Schrödinger was wrong. How was it wrong? As I say, the intention of the cat’s mental experiment was “to demonstrate the absurdity of this situation, since the special properties of quantum mechanics usually disappear on a macroscopic scale. The quantum properties of a complete cat cannot be demonstrated in a laboratory experiment.” However, since these researchers were successful in demonstrating that the very strange properties of the quantum world can also be seen in a larger system, none of this is so clear. This explains very well people like Anthony Leggett Because, although “a macroscopic system composed of numerous pairs of Cooper remains many orders of magnitude smaller than a kitten”, the key of the experiment is that “there are phenomena that involve a large number of particles that, together, behave as they predict quantum mechanics.” A Nobel to kill a cat. “It would surprise you very much if the ball suddenly appeared on the other side of the wall. In quantum mechanics, this type of phenomenon is called a tunnel effect and is precisely the type of phenomenon that has given it the reputation of being strange and not very intuitive,” explained the award committee. That is precisely what these researchers showed that it could happen at the macroscopic level. But they did something else. And I do not mean to lay the foundations that have allowed us to create the technological system we know: from the transistors of the computer microchips that we see everywhere to quantum cryptography. No. I mean blurring the wall that separated the world from the very small with the world we know. Along the way, “they killed a cat”; But because of the gap they opened, one of the best science we have was sneaked. Image | Nobel Foundation In Xataka | Don’t call it “Nobel Prize,” call it “how Swedes are dynamiting current science”

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics is for John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis

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The Nobel Prize in Physics of 2024 has been awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum tunnelization and the quantification of energy in an electrical circuit.” The Nobel Committee He has decided Highlight the important advance that has been seen in the quantum field and that today are the basis of all the digital technology that we use practically daily. Quantum mechanics. Those awarded this Nobel did experiments in 1984 and 1985 with a closed electrical circuit with superconductors. The key in this case was that among the drivers there was an area that was not a conductor. Thanks to this, both the typing tunnel effect and “quantized energy levels in a system large enough to hold it in hand were allowed to demonstrate.” Something that could be wonderful on paper, but that had to be carried out with the aim of being fully functional and had a real application in our day to day. Applications. Thanks to this work we know the technology as it is, because its applications are many today. One of the clearest examples is in the transistors of computer microchips that is in almost everything around us. But beyond this he has also given quantum cryptography or quantum computers. Tunnel effect A concept that can be very difficult to understand, but that from the Nobel committee have wanted to exemplify with an example: It would surprise you very much if the ball suddenly appeared on the other side of the wall. In quantum mechanics, this type of phenomenon is called a tunnel effect and is precisely the type of phenomenon that has given it the reputation of being strange and not very intuitive. In this case, the winners were able to demonstrate with a series of experiments that the (very strange) properties of the quantum world can be sustained in their hand in a sufficiently large system. In this way, the electrical system they have designed allows you to pass from one state to another through a tunnel as if the ball crossed the wall, when a priori seems impossible. And it is precisely what has been awarded: to take the tunnel effect on a macroscopic scale in a centimeter chip. The pools. As every year, there are many candidates who can come to mind when thinking about this award, and that ‘the shots’ go to roads that are very different. On the one hand, it points to the moment of boiling and the enthusiasm around the quantum information that is fundamental for the security of communications or in problem solving. On the other hand, the pools also point to the physics of materials that always give us some kind of surprise throughout the year. But if we change completely, we could also have gone to the field of astrophysics and the advances that have been made in the study of the cosmos and that in recent years has always given many surprises. The prize. The Nobel Prize in Physics has a wide history since the first recognition was granted in 1901 to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. In its long history it has been granted on 117 occasions and 225 people have been recognized with the most distinctive prize. On the ‘bad’ side is that this is the award that has less women has awarded: only five. As a striking history, Marie Curie is one of the few people who has received two Nobel noise throughout her life: that of Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911. And if we talk about ‘double awards’, we must also highlight John Bardeen who is the only person who has won this Nobel twice: in 1956 and 1972. In Xataka | Exactly 100 years ago we began to understand how the world works. Quantum physics has radically changed our lives

There is nothing to make blue in blue eyes. If we want to understand why, we have to resort to physics

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Many of us learned first genetics lessons through peas and eye color. But there is more science when Explain the color that acquire our eyes. Not only does physics intervene but also a somewhat more complex biology than we believed in the beginning. Nature and blue. The blue color It is not one of the most frequent In nature. Perhaps that is why exceptions such as the flowers of this color, the plumages of some birds or the wings of certain insects are striking. A reason is in the optimization of resources. Blue pigments are molecules that reflect light in certain segments of the electromagnetic spectrum, those of blue tones, giving color to an object. The problem with these molecules is that They usually have a large size. This makes them difficult to synthesize by living beings so, if they do not offer a significant evolutionary advantage, they will not be created by our body. It is not chemical, it is physical. That is why when we see the blue color in nature, it is likely that its origin is not in a chemical compound but in some physical phenomenon. This is what happens, for example, in the case of the plumage of some birds, whose origin is in nanostructures whose shape is responsible for reflecting the light in short lengths of the visible spectrum, those of blue color. And it is also the case with blue eyes. Absence of pigmentation. Only that in the case of blue eyes it is not about the nanostructures but of the iris and of the Tyndall effectan effect similar to the person responsible for seeing the blue sky (and the red sunsets), Explain in an article in The conversation Davinia Beaver, expert in regenerative medicine of the Bond University, in Australia. When the light enters our eye, the suspended particles found in it interact with the shortest spectrum lengths, causing them to disseminate more, “bouncing” thus part of the blue color of the waves outside. The brown, quite the opposite. This effect does not occur among people with brown eyes because there is a pigment in this. This “catch” part of the light causing it not to escape so easily from the eye, giving darker tones. The pigment in question: melaninthe same responsible for darker skin tones. There are more eyes colors, such as green or “hazelnut color” eyes. These colors can be seen as the combination of the dispersion of the light of the Tyndall effect, modulated by a certain presence of melanin, either in small quantities or concentrated in some regions of the iris. Genetics is not so simple. The genetics we study in our school stage, of course, is simple, a simplified version of what we know about this field of biology. A field, in addition, that has been advancing over time, becoming more complex as we detract more and more details about its operation, Beaver remembers. Point out, for example, there are several genes that affect the appearance of our eyes, so family ins and outs that lead to one or another eye color may not be as perceptible as we believe. Eye color can also change as a result of other factors such as our age, as melanin accumulates in our eyes, which usually happens during growth. Certain medical conditions, Beaver adds, can also influence this color. In Xataka | We have been trying to decipher if all humans see the colors the same. We still have no response Image | Michael Morse

The almost instantaneous load batteries and a shelf life close to eternity are taking shape. Thanks to quantum physics

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Integrated circuits containing all our electronic devices, Solar panelsmagnetic resonance machines, The lasers or the atomic watches that allow the human being to measure time with an unprecedented precision would not be possible without the knowledge he has given us Modern Quantum Theory. And, of course, without this model we would not have Quantum computers. Objectively, and it is not at all an exaggeration, quantum physics is present in much of modern technology. During the last five years several research groups, such as the PSL Research University (University of Recherche Paris Sciences et Lettres), which resides in Paris (France), or that of the University of Pisa, in Italy, have tried to use the basic principles of quantum mechanics to point A new generation of batteries. And the results are getting little by little. This is its starting point: they pursue to use overlap, entanglement and superabsorption to tear down the limitations that electrochemical batteries currently impose. The quantum storage of energy is an ideal that is increasingly closer The main difference between quantum batteries and conventional electrochemicals is that the latter depend on chemical reactions, while quantum devices seek to store energy in the quantum states of some particles, such as, for example, photons. It seems complicated, and it is, but the really important thing for users is that quantum batteries on paper can be loaded almost instantaneously, they will have a much higher energy density, and, in addition, their degradation will be minimal as the load cycles pass. Quantum batteries can store energy in a superposition of multiple energy states simultaneously It sounds wonderful. So much, in fact, that seems science fiction. However, it is very important that, as we have just seen, let’s not overlook that their principle of operation will be, if they finally come to fruition, very different from that of conventional electrochemical batteries. Existing theoretical proposals argue that quantum batteries They can store energy in an overlap of multiple energy states simultaneously, which should allow them to deliver a much greater energy density. In addition, your theory load will be much faster, even almost instantaneous, due to the collective quantum effects of the quantum units that make them up. The most amazing thing in this field is that the higher the capacity of the quantum battery, the faster it will load. It is an intuitive characteristic, it is true, but it is possible precisely thanks to the collective quantum effects I just talked about. However, this is not all. And it is that on paper the degradation that these batteries will experience during energy transfer will be minimal, so your useful life will be much greater than that of conventional batteries. Perhaps, even, almost eternal if we compare it with the longevity of the human being. So far all the work that researchers had carried out in this area had condensed in purely theoretical models, but this panorama has just changed. And it is that several scientists from the universities that I have mentioned in the second paragraph of this text have published an article very interesting in which they propose How to make a quantum battery. Your idea is to use superconductor circuits produced with materials that exhibit essentially zero resistance at low temperatures. They have not yet manufactured anything, so it is evident that the hardest work, the experimental, is still pending. But there is no doubt that this proposal invites us to tie the future of quantum batteries with reasonable optimism. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | Phys.org In Xataka | We have created the most lasting battery in history: 5,700 years thanks to the diamond and carbon-14

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