Recently, a team of researchers made headlines for a stunning announcement: a theoretical breakthrough that expanded our understanding of the first law of thermodynamics. But to understand that result ...

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 ...

A microscopic version of a diving board has been driven to cheat the second law of thermodynamics 95 per cent of the time. The finding doesn’t challenge the validity of the law, but underscores how ...

Two physicists at the University of Stuttgart have proven that the Carnot principle, a central law of thermodynamics, does ...

Sadi Carnot was a child of the Industrial Revolution. Steam power was widely used in manufacturing and mining by his birth in 1796, and the first steamboat and first steam railroad locomotive were ...

Thanks to the power of fluctuation relations, physicists are taking the second law of thermodynamics to settings once thought impossible. Since the steam engine began modernizing the world, the second ...

Chase P. Broedersz is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and the Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, Ludwig ...

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 ...

Scientists have created the world's hottest engine running at temperatures hotter than those reached in the sun's core. The ...