Initially investigating out of pure curiosity, researchers have made a discovery that bridges the gap between Aristotle's observations two millennia ago and modern-day understanding, while opening the ...

Does hot water freeze faster than cold water? Aristotle may have been the first to tackle this question that later became known as the Mpemba effect. This phenomenon originally referred to the ...

The Mpemba effect is originally referred to the non-monotonic initial temperature dependence of the freezing start time, but it has been observed in various systems -- including colloids -- and has ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Not every scoop of ice cream can be described as “fateful.” But a batch of ice cream Erasto Mpemba made as a teenager in Tanzania in 1963 made waves in physics that are still being felt nearly 60 ...

It sounds like one of the easiest experiments possible: Take two cups of water: one hot, one cold. Place both in a freezer and note which one freezes first. Common sense suggests that the colder water ...

Decades after a Tanzanian teenager initiated study of the “Mpemba effect,” the effort to confirm or refute it is leading physicists toward new theories about how substances relax to equilibrium. It ...

Two cool(ing) cats: Two systems of quantum dots connected to a heat bath (represented here by cats), one with a current flowing and the other in an equilibrium state, experience a "crossing" as the ...

Heating up Physicists have shown that a colder trapped-ion qubit can warm-up faster than a hotter qubit. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Evgenia-Fux) The inverse Mpemba ...