Humans use lasers for everything from scanning barcodes and putting on light shows to performing delicate eye surgery and measuring the distances between objects in space. Cats also like to chase lasers, but I wasn’t sure how they worked. I asked my friend Chris Keane, a physics professor at Washington State University. Keane came to […]
Kelvin Lynn, Regents Professor with a dual appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, has received a $200,000 award from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office to advance solar research and development. Lynn, who is also the Boeing Chair for Advanced Materials, and his group are working to […]
WSU Physics and Astronomy Club celebrates 14 years of tossing squash from Pullman’s highest point. For the past 14 years, Washington State University’s Physics and Astronomy Club has experimented firsthand with the explosive capabilities of pumpkins. WSU hosted the club’s annual pumpkin drop Saturday, where attendees painted around 80 of the doomed gourds with an […]
With murmurs and pointing, the crowd watches as a face and then hands—holding a large object—appear in the twelfth-story window of WSU’s Webster Physical Sciences Building. On the ground, Butch T. Cougar begins a countdown: five, four, three, two… At one, the hands release a 10-pound, half-frozen pumpkin that rockets to the courtyard, exploding in […]
New microscope costs less, shows promise for university researchers A startup company launched by a WSU professor has received a $740,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to continue research and eventually commercialize a new, less expensive and easy-to-use microscope. Matthew McCluskey, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy, filed for a provisional […]
Sand is actually made up of lots of different things. When we look at it under the microscope, we can see cooled lava, coral, seashells, and other kinds of wonderful, colorful rocks. If you add just the right amount of water to sand, it transforms into a pretty good material for shaping towers, walls, and […]
WSU professor shows Hubble Space Telescope’s greatest images, details history About 50 people tilted their heads back, gazed up at the Washington State University Planetarium dome and took in images from space Sunday at Sloan Hall on the WSU campus in Pullman. Long before Sunday’s sunset, viewers sat in the dark room looking up at […]
WSU physicists have a new laboratory in outer space. On May 20, the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), a remotely operated research platform, blasted off for the International Space Station (ISS) where it will be used by researchers to probe quantum phenomena that would be impossible to observe on Earth. Professor Peter Engels and graduate student […]
The frontier of human knowledge can be measured in collisions. With the right instruments, you can hear their echoes, from billions of years ago, many light years away. Physicists and astronomers are slowly listening to the stories inside these echoes, known as “gravitational waves,” in hopes of learning more about the birth of the universe […]
In its day, a five-foot-tall golden microscope on the Washington State University campus was the most powerful imaging device on the continent. Despite its scientific significance, it has been largely lost from the pages of history. Michael Knoblauch, a biology professor at Washington State University, wants to fix this. “Europe’s first electron microscope earned its […]