We live in a world made of atoms.

Gas temperature is just a way of expressing how much movement energy the molecules have on average, but each individual molecule is constantly speeding up and slowing down, exchanging its energy with the others as they collide.

Sperm whales are never breathing from their lungs when they make these deep dives. It’s far too dangerous.

Knowing about some basic bits of physics turns the world into a toybox.

Up on the high plateau, hot desert air had cooled, become more dense, and slithered downslope, just like the winds that faced Scott in Antarctica.

A toaster can teach you about some of the most fundamental laws of physics,

Each corn kernel contains a germ, which is the start of a new plant, and the endosperm, which is there as food for the new plant. The endosperm is made up of starch packaged into granules, and it contains about 14 per cent water. As the kernels sat in the hot oil, that water was starting to evaporate, turning into steam. Hotter molecules move

nugget of physics

underneath shifted the lid and fluff started taking flight. At the moment of catastrophe, the rules change. Until that point, a fixed amount of water vapour is confined, and the pressure it exerts on the inside of the shell increases as the temperature increases. But when the hard shell finally succumbs, the insides are exposed to the atmospheric