Science: resources for teachers

A humanoid robot has completed a 100-meter sprint in 9.32 seconds, beating the world record set by sprinter Usain Bolt.

Named Lightning, the machine attained a peak velocity of 14.5 meters per second during a preparatory trial for the second World Humanoid Robot Games, which began in Beijing on Saturday.

More than 2,000 humanoid robots were participating in the event, the organizer said.

Bill Gates is sounding the alarm about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

In multiple interviews Gates gave as he published an essay outlining his concerns with the AI industry, the founder of Microsoft said AI companies aren’t being honest about the danger their products pose.

In the essay, Gates shared his three biggest concerns about the rapidly advancing technology along with a few ideas to safeguard humanity against AI’s threats.

We look through windows every single day, yet the fact we can see a clear image through them is actually kind of amazing - this video explains why.

We let Philip Moriarty off the leash to discuss burstiness and draw some graphs on his blackboard. Enjoy!

When you ask an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude a question, the model goes through its massive amount of training data and guesses the answer by mathematically predicting the word most likely to appear next in a sentence.

Another YouTube #shorts from Dr. Joe! Subscribe for more fun science stories.

Was Cygnus X-1 a black hole? These astrophysicists made a bet.

Here’s why centrifugal force is considered a “fictitious” force.

Centrifugal force feels completely real — but physicists call it a pseudo-force. So why does it feel so powerful?

At Jodrell Bank, I fulfill a childhood dream. 

Put a cat in a box with a radioactive atom. Add a radiation detector that triggers the release of poisonous cyanide gas.

Schrödinger's thought experiment was supposed to be a criticism of quantum mechanics and is now one of it's best explainers.

Here's why and what happens to the cat...

If there's a hotel with infinite rooms, could it ever be completely full?

Could you run out of space to put everyone?

The surprising answer is yes -- this is important to know if you're the manager of the Hilbert Hotel.

The second edition of the World Humanoid Games kicked off in China on Saturday.

The competition will run for five days and has already included a robot running faster than Usain Bolt's 100m sprint world record.

Elsewhere at the event in Beijing, a robot performed Cristiano Ronaldo's iconic 'Siuuu' celebration on the football pitch and droids took part in synchronised marching at its opening ceremony.

China’s Unitree Robotics – the world's biggest producer of humanoid and canine robots – based designs for its most successful four-legged machines on innovations funded by the U.S. military, according to three top robotics researchers and a former U.S. defense technology official.

This is the winning entry for the 2014 Flame Challenge put on by Alan Alda and the Center for Communicating Science. http://flamechallenge.org

People are claiming that modern data centers don't have a water problem, but is that true?

LIGO may have detected a black hole that shouldn't exist, potentially revealing the first evidence of primordial black holes formed in the earliest moments after the Big Bang. But the bigger story is how a decade of gravitational-wave astronomy has transformed from proving Einstein right into a mature science capable of uncovering entirely new physics.

How long is a day on the sun? At first might seem like a stupid question.
A day is how long it takes the sun to come back overhead.
Doesn’t happen on the sun, unless you’re standing upside down, in which case days on the sun are infinitesimally short and your hair is on fire.
But maybe a day is how long it takes to spin around relative to the distant stars, in which case different parts of the sun have different days because it’s a big ball of flowing, gassy plasma and different parts rotate at different rates: relative to distant stars, the sun’s equator rotates once every 24 and a half earth days, while near its poles it rotates roughly every 34 earth days.
Or maybe a day is simply 86400 seconds, in which case a day on the sun is slightly longer than a day on the earth due to gravitational time dilation.

Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in a minute!

Created by Henry Reich

Why can hot water sometimes freeze faster than cold water? In 1963, Erasto Mpemba noticed this while making ice cream, sparking a scientific mystery that still puzzles physicists. The Mpemba effect now appears in materials, magnets and quantum systems, revealing surprising connections between energy, equilibrium and the strange ways nature finds shortcuts.

Removing radioactive debris was often deadly.

To coincide with the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Japan launched a groundbreaking bullet train that inspired countries around the world to invest in high-speed rail. Today, high-speed trains regularly travel at over 300 km/h, on par with the take-off speed of a commercial airplane. But can it ever be faster than flying? Ning Zhao details the possibilities and hurdles facing high-speed rail transit.

Why do objects travel with waves?

We're taught waves only transfer energy, not material, but objects wash ashore all the time.

How does this work?

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