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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A team of University of Arkansas physicists has successfully developed a circuit capable of capturing graphene's thermal motion and converting it into an electrical current. “An energy-harvesting circuit based on graphene could be incorporated into a chip to provide clean, limitless, low-voltage power for small devices or sensors,” said Paul Thibado, professor of physics and lead researcher in the discovery.The findings, titled "Fluctuation-induced current from freestanding graphene," and published in the journal Physical Review E, are proof of a theory the physicists developed at the U of A three years ago that freestanding graphene — a single...

The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — one that physicists use to probe the physics of information ============================================================= It took physicists 115 years to tame Maxwell’s Demon. The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Physicists quantify this tendency to spread by counting the number of possible ways the dye molecules can be arranged. There’s one possible state where the molecules are crowded into the thimble. There’s another where, say, the molecules...

The black hole is enormous, with a radius of roughly 9 billion miles... The concept of a black hole goes back to the 18th century, when the English astronomer-clergyman John Michell calculated that a sufficiently large star couldn't shine because light wouldn’t move fast enough to “lift off” and escape the star’s gravity. But Michell’s conjecture outran the physics of its time, which didn’t understand light, gravity or stars well enough to support it. The foundations for the modern understanding of black holes weren’t laid until the early 20th century, building on James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism and Albert...

Tweet TO MUCH fanfare, Italy celebrated 150 years since its unification two weeks ago. Less exuberantly, America is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war, a failed attempt to undo its union. Amid this flurry of historical fissions and fusions it is easy to overlook another, arguably more significant unification set in motion in spring 1861. In March of that year James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist (pictured above), published the first piece of a four-part paper entitled "On physical lines of force". Sprinkled amid the prose in the Philosophical Magazine were equations which revealed...

Mathematicians have found solutions to a 140-year-old, seven-dimensional equation that were not known to exist for more than a century, despite its widespread use in modeling the behavior of gases. During the late 1860s and 1870s, physicists James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann developed this equation to predict how gaseous material distributes itself in space and how it responds to changes in things like temperature, pressure or velocity. Solutions of the equation, beyond current computational capabilities, describe the location of gas molecules probabilistically and predict the likelihood that a molecule will reside at any particular location and have a particular...