Many solid materials "remember" their past. A piece of metal may respond differently after being stretched, heated, or cooled, and memory materials rely precisely on this kind of history-dependent ...

For more than half a century, materials scientists have struggled with how to simulate the complexity of polymer materials.

Thermodynamics is the study of heat and energy. At its heart are laws that describe how energy moves around within a system, whether an atom, a hurricane or a black hole. The first law describes how ...

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 ...

Physicists at West Virginia University have made a breakthrough on an age-old limitation of the first law of thermodynamics. West Virginia University physicists have made a breakthrough on an age-old ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: 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 ...

As physicists extend the 19th-century laws of thermodynamics to the quantum realm, they’re rewriting the relationships among energy, entropy and information. In his 1824 book, Reflections on the ...

Thermodynamics engineers apply the science of energy, work, temperature, and heat to design and develop products, playing a crucial role in aerospace engine design, mechanical engineering, and ...

The zeroth law of thermodynamics states that if two bodies are each in thermal equilibrium with some third body, then they are also in equilibrium with each other. Thermal equilibrium means that when ...