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 ...

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, ...

Tanzanian student Erasto Mpemba noticed something strange while making ice cream in the 1960s: his hot mixture froze before a cooler batch. That observation, later formalized with physicist Denis ...

The question I have is - under which conditions would you say that the experiment shows the reasoning wrong, instead of experiment itself having been 'done wrong'? For example - if you do something as ...

In a new Nature Communications study, scientists have demonstrated the quantum version of the strong Mpemba effect (sME) in a single trapped ion system. The Mpemba effect is a counterintuitive ...

A common chemical process may explain a bizarre property of water that has been a mystery since the time of Aristotle – how hot water can freeze more quickly than cold. This strange and ...

A team of physicists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has successfully demonstrated the inverse Mpemba effect at the quantum level using single trapped ions. In their study, published in ...

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 ...