Finnish-built “oblique” icebreaker with an asymmetrical hull gets more done – and breaks the mould for ship design With most kinds of seriously gnarly machinery and equipment, development usually consists of upticks in easy appreciable commercial metrics like size, capacity or speed. Incremental, marginal improvements but rarely anything seriously radical. In ships, for example, the basics of hull shape haven’t really changed since prehistoric times –...

ColdQuanta In Colorado works with ultracold atom technology such as Bose-Einstein condensates – but doesn’t find it easy to explain … Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are sometimes referred to as a “fifth state of matter”, a rare state or phase in which all the particles share the same quantum state, at temperatures just above absolute zero. This ultracold environment makes the wavelengths of the atoms increase...