Swans on Tea

Optical Trapping and the Momentum of Light
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The explanation talks about the wave-particle duality, but I think that’s a distraction. This is a dipole force phenomenon; the beam’s intensity is greatest at the center, and where the focal point occurs, as shown in the [...]

If it sticks, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
Uncertain Principles: Eucatastrophe in Physics

Sometimes, an equipment failure can be the best thing that happens to an experiment. This is particularly true in labs that rely on short-term labor like post-docs (who are generally hired for about two years) and graduate students [...]

Slowed light breaks record
Although this separation process involves distorting the pulse-storing BEC – and hence the nature of the revived pulse – it is completely deterministic, which means that no quantum information is lost. By doing so, the team was able to store the pulse for up to about 1.5 s, shattering the previous record [...]

Another video, reminiscent of the viral popcorn-popped-with-a-cellphone video I discussed a while back
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And, in fact one of the response videos is with popcorn
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Also one involving toast
Objections: One is electrostatic. Matt has [...]

I was decreasing the local entropy in a small part of my abode and found a shoebox full of photos which happened to contain a few shots of my grad school lab, in all its glory. We were building an interferometer which would use cold atoms, which means relatively large deBroglie wavelengths and a [...]

This has it all. A scientist, working on his own, discovering something new (and useful) using proper scientific methodology … and he’s in high school. WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags
First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create [...]

Is coming from sciencegeekgirl’s Hands on Science Sunday: Feeling pressured?
All you need is a big trash bag and an industrial strength vacuum cleaner, and a willing victim (er, “faithful subject of science.”) The victim (aka “subject) gets inside the bag, and once you suck all the air out of the bag with the vacuum cleaner, [...]

Extreme Ultraviolet Laser Challenges Einstein
No, not really. (Any headline that implies that Einstein might be wrong is invariably incorrect — these are things that have been tested for 100 years)
In the new study, the physicists shot xenon atoms with FLASH, an x-ray laser that uses intense photons in the extreme ultraviolet energy range, [...]

Backreaction: Counting Atoms in a Sphere
An overview of the projects that are trying to redefine the kilogram to come up with a better standard.
Related: Round as a Baby’s . . . Nodule

Nobody can see the one at the end of the line, and (s)he’s doing something different.
Nanophysicists find unexpected magnetic effect
In new research appearing this week in the journal Nature, physicists at Spain’s University of Alicante and at Rice University in Houston have found that single-atom contacts made of ferromagnetic metals like iron, cobalt and nickel [...]

Those who divide the people in the world into two types, and those who don’t.
Or, you can divide experiments up by classifying them as edible or inedible: Edible/Inedible Experiments Archive

The PRL from the ArXiv paper I linked to in Follow the Bouncing Atom has been published.
Phys Rev Focus has a story on it