Researchers have made a breakthrough in applying the first law of thermodynamics to complex systems. The law is a bedrock of physics, but has long failed to describe systems that are out of ...

A series of quantum physics experiments and theoretical papers now suggest that heat can flow spontaneously from a cold object to a hot one, provided the right quantum conditions are in place. This ...

Two physicists at the University of Stuttgart have proven that the Carnot principle, a central law of thermodynamics, does not apply to objects on the atomic scale whose physical properties are linked ...

Picture Victorian London, but its skies are filled with airships. Steam-powered robots crowd the streets, mingling with people in top hats and petticoats. That type of retrofuturistic mash-up is the ...

We are used to heat flowing from hot objects to cool ones, and never the other way round, but now researchers have found it is possible to pull off this trick in the strange realm of quantum mechanics ...

If someone asked you “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would be most ...

In real life, laws are broken all the time. Besides your everyday criminals, there are scammers and fraudsters, politicians and mobsters, corporations and nations that regard laws as suggestions ...

In seeming defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, nature is filled with examples of order emerging from chaos. A new theoretical framework resolves the apparent paradox Science has given ...