Science

Protons contain three quarks that are glued together by particles called gluonsSefa Kart/Alamy The proton, one of the building blocks for all matter, has a variable size depending on how you look at it. If you are looking at its charge, it will have one radius, but if you look at its mass, you will see a smaller radius because its mass is kept at the centre. “We have a new picture of the proton. It’s not that we removed information, it’s new in the sense that we’ve added information that wasn’t there,” says Zein-Eddine Meziani at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. In the 1960s, experiments that fired electrons at protons revealed that the latter contained point-like, electrically charged particles, which we now call quarks. A proton has two up quarks and a down o...

Sea Level Rise: A Crash Course for All Jacqueline Austermann is an assistant professor at Columbia University and part of the Seismology, Geology and Tectonophysics Division of the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her recent talk focused on what’s driving sea level rise, and why seas will rise differently in different locations. The latest and most comprehensive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report holds dire warnings. The report details how humans have been responsible for the 1.1 degrees C of temperature rise since the industrial era. It also shows the impacts of this warming are already lethal and disproportionate...

Infrared image of a buildingIvan Smalyukh A see-through aerogel made from wood could replace air in double-glazed windows and make them as insulating as walls. Windows with air sandwiched in the gap between plates of glass can be made better insulators by either increasing the number of glass panels, which can affect visual quality, or expanding the width of the air layer — but anything beyond around 1.5 centimetres becomes detrimental to the insulation effect because convection currents circulate more easily. To address this, Ivan Smalyukh at the University of Colorado Boulder and his colleagues used nanofibres of cellulose to create an aerogel, a solid gel containing pockets of gas, that could function better than air in double glazing. “We have a very unusual combin...

  Thomas Hertog (left) collaborated with Stephen Hawking for many yearsCourtesy of Thomas Hertog IT WAS common knowledge among students at the University of Cambridge that whoever obtained the best marks in the final part of the mathematical tripos exams would be summoned to see Stephen Hawking. I had just got my results and had come top. Sure enough, I was invited for a discussion with him. I made my way to his office deep in the labyrinth of the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics, which was housed in a creaking Victorian building on the banks of the river Cam. Stephen’s office was just off the main common room, and even though it was noisy there, he liked to keep his door ajar. I knocked, paused and slowly pushed it open. I didn’t quite know wh...