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? On its face this idea seems like it should be ridiculously simple to test, and even easier to intuit, but this question has in fact had physicists arguing ...

The mystery of why hot water seems to freeze before cold water is one that has long puzzled physicists, who have proposed various mechanisms that could allow for the so-called “Mpemba effect”, even ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Does hot water freeze faster than cold water? On its face this idea seems like it should be ridiculously simple to test, and even easier to intuit, but this question has in fact had physicists arguing ...

Did you know that hot water can freeze faster than cold water? It sounds completely backwards, but it happens and is called ...

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 ...

The Mpemba effect in nonequilibrium quantum systems refers to the counterintuitive phenomenon whereby certain quantum states prepared further from a target steady state can approach that state more ...