Somewhere out there exists the perfect suspension. In theoretical worlds governed by equations and engineering, we're taught that by combining the proper spring and damping rate onto a known mass ...

A plucked guitar string can vibrate for seconds before falling silent. A playground swing, emptied of its passenger, will gradually come to rest. These are what physicists call "damped harmonic ...

Now that gravitational waves have been detected, theoreticians have been furiously speculating about what we might learn from our gravitational wave observatories. Now that we have a couple of ...

Imagine plucking a guitar string. It vibrates, the sound lingers, and then fades away as the energy drains into the air. Now bring this scene down to the scale of an atom. Can an atom vibrate in the ...

A Vermont research team has cracked a 90-year-old puzzle, creating a quantum version of the damped harmonic oscillator. By reformulating Lamb’s classical model, they showed how atomic vibrations can ...

The input stage of an off-line power converter usually contains an LC averaging filter. A common practice is to damp the LC filter using additional reactive/dissipative components. In this article, we ...

When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a constant quest for an even better hammer, as the popular saying goes. At least, that seems to be [Ebenisterie Éloïse]’s situation. She wanted a ...

Older baby boomers aren’t moving out of their homes, while younger boomers reaching retirement now are increasingly facing homelessness. We break down this trend and explain its impact. Photos: Joe ...