Open Your Mind

  How the Brain Turns Facial Expressions Into Social Messages The Quiet Science Behind a Simple Smile A smile looks simple enough. Someone’s lips curl upward, their eyes soften a little, and almost instantly the mood in the room shifts. We all recognize the feeling. One person smiles, and somehow the atmosphere changes. Others begin to mirror it, sometimes without even noticing. There is an old jazz standard called When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You) that plays with this idea. The song became widely known through the warm, unmistakable voice of Louis Armstrong and was later performed by singers such as Frank Sinatra and Michael Bublé. The message is cheerful and simple. Smile, and the world smiles back. At first glance that sounds like a poetic exaggeration. But when researchers began looking closely at how facial expressions actually emerge from the brain, the story turned out to be surprisingly complex. Beneath what looks like a tiny movement of the lips lies a ...

Can Knots Exist in the Fourth Dimension Trying to Picture the Fourth Dimension Most of us go through life without ever questioning the structure of space around us. We move through rooms, walk down streets, climb stairs, toss a ball to a friend. Everything feels natural because our brains are built to understand the world in three dimensions. Forward and backward. Left and right. Up and down. That is the stage on which every physical experience of our lives plays out. Still, every so often someone brings up a strange idea that nudges the imagination a little further. What about a fourth dimension. Not metaphorically, not as science fiction magic, but as an actual direction in space. Something you could theoretically move through just like you move north or south. At first the concept feels slippery. People often hear the phrase four dimensional space and immediately think of time, especially because physics tends to bundle time together with space in what scientists call space time. Th...

The Rise of Sodium Ion Batteries and What It Means for EV Technology Sodium Ion Batteries Could Change the Future of Electric Vehicles The Quiet Technology Behind Modern Life If you stop for a moment and look around, it becomes pretty obvious that rechargeable batteries quietly run much of the modern world. Phones. Laptops. Electric cars. Even the wireless earbuds people lose every other week. Most of these devices rely on the same core technology lithium ion batteries. Lithium ion batteries started becoming commercially viable in the early 1990s, and since then they have dominated portable electronics. The reason is fairly straightforward. They pack a lot of energy into a small and lightweight package, they can deliver high voltage quickly, and they recharge reasonably well. For engineers trying to design slimmer phones or longer range electric cars, that combination is extremely attractive. However, technological dominance rarely lasts forever. Engineers and chemists are constantly s...

  When Tiny Droplets Start Folding Like Origami A Strange Transformation at the Nanoscale Imagine watching a tiny droplet of liquid under a microscope. At first it looks ordinary enough. Round, smooth, exactly what you would expect from something shaped by surface tension. Leave it alone, and nothing dramatic happens. But then the temperature rises slightly. Something subtle shifts at the surface. The droplet, which a moment earlier looked perfectly stable, begins to change its geometry. Edges appear. The smooth sphere sharpens into a hexagon. And then, quite unexpectedly, that hexagon folds inward and turns into a six pointed star. Not a metaphorical star. A real geometric hexagram shape. This is exactly the behavior researchers recently observed in a set of experiments conducted by scientists in France and Israel. The work reveals a phenomenon that is almost poetic in its mechanics. Tiny droplets, stabilized by microscopic molecular layers, begin to fold like sheets of nanoscale ...