Yuen Yiu
InsideScience - ISNS
Berwyn, MD, United States
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Past articles by Yuen:
To Light or Not To Light Our Skies
(Inside Science) -- I was born and raised in Hong Kong -- the Pearl of the Orient. It's one of the most vibrant cities in the world and is famous for its neon-lit night markets. I also did not see the Milky Way until I was 30, when I visited Monument Valley in the Navajo Nation. → Read More
MRI with a Trampoline
(Inside Science) -- Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, is commonly used in hospitals for scanning the bodies of patients. Researchers from Switzerland sought to expand the technique for studying something much smaller -- down to a single virus with atomic resolution. → Read More
The Cultural Heritage of the Namibian Dark Sky
(Inside Science) -- Darkness disappears as soon as we turn on the light. The same goes for the stars twinkling in our night skies. → Read More
Astronomers Are Studying the Atmospheres of Faraway Planets
(Inside Science) -- The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was built and successfully launched in 2018 to hunt for planets outside of our solar system. The $287 million instrument has located more than 2,000 potential exoplanets, with 91 of them already confirmed. TESS detects exoplanets by monitoring the brightness of stars. Stars dim temporarily when an object passes in front of… → Read More
The History of Our Galaxy Buried Under Our Feet
(Inside Science) -- Scientists have figured out a way to look into our galactic past and the proposed method is literally groundbreaking: It involves digging up salt crystals from miles underground. A paper describing the approach was recently published in Physical Review Letters. → Read More
The Geographical Origins of Thanksgiving Foods
(Inside Science) -- Without the agriculture of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the British wouldn’t have their fish and chips, Italians would be eating pizzas without tomato sauce, and the Swiss would be without their chocolate. And perhaps most importantly, your Thanksgiving dinner would have nothing but dinner rolls. In a globalized world, we seldom think about the origins of specific… → Read More
A Third of Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Tied to Food
(Inside Science) -- When it comes to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, it is time to talk about the cow in the room. → Read More
The Fear of Setting the Planet on Fire with a Nuclear Weapon
(Inside Science) -- In "Inside the Third Reich," a memoir by Albert Speer, the former minister of armament of Nazi Germany recalls an exchange he had with the physicist Werner Heisenberg and Adolf Hitler:"Heisenberg had not given any final answer to my question whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control with absolute certainty or might continue as a chain reaction. → Read More
When Scientists Find Nothing: The Value of Null Results
(Inside Science) -- How long would it have taken Edison to invent the lightbulb if he and his team of workers hadn’t keep track of all the failures? From platinum filaments to animal hair, his team built a library of thousands of materials before patenting carbonized bamboo as the best material. Decades more would pass before Hungarian Sándor Just and Croatian Franjo Hanaman → Read More
Suspending a Single Molecule Inside a Drop of Helium
(Inside Science) -- By suspending a single molecule consisting of just two metal atoms in a tiny droplet of liquid helium, physicists have demonstrated a new way to study the ultrafast vibrational dynamics of molecules. The technique may help researchers develop high-performing organic photovoltaic materials for future solar cells.Popping a bottle of helium “champagne”The → Read More
Fighting Misinformation About a Novel Disease
(Inside Science) -- As the number of confirmed cases for COVID-19 continues to soar, so does the amount of information -- and misinformation -- about the disease. While some misinformation can be relatively benign, some has generated problems secondary to the pandemic such as xenophobia and hysteria.While there are nuances in terms of how each piece of misinformation about the → Read More
Got Sleep Apnea? Tongue Fat May Be to Blame
(Inside Science) -- Obstructive sleep apnea is a common disorder in which people stop breathing in their sleep due to blockage of their upper airway. A recent paper published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine has singled out the main culprit behind this blockage -- a fat tongue.Obesity has long been linked with obstructive sleep apnea. The study → Read More
New Light Sail Design Would Use Laser Beam to Ride Into Space
(Inside Science) -- In long distance space travel, traditional rockets would eventually run out of fuel. → Read More
Why Do We Need Super Accurate Atomic Clocks?
(Inside Science) -- The GPS receiver in your car or cellphone works by listening to satellites broadcast their time and location. Once the receiver has "acquired" four satellites, it can calculate its own position by comparing the signals. Since the signals are broadcast using microwaves that travel at the speed of light, an error of a millionth of a second on a GPS satellite → Read More
Detecting a Single Unit of Sound
(Inside Science) -- Just as light waves have a particle version -- the photon -- sound waves do too. Called a phonon, it's a way to quantify incredibly tiny packets of sound, or vibrations, and is particularly important for understanding certain properties of solids such as electric resistivity. And just like how the study of light brought us modern-day technologies such as → Read More
Why Do Yellow Pigments Darken Over Time?
(Inside Science) -- If you are lucky enough to have seen Leonardo da Vinci’s "The Last Supper" in person, you may be disappointed to learn that only about 20% of it is original. Most of the mural is actually the work of restorers whose efforts spanned hundreds of years. → Read More
Jupiter’s Magnetic Field is Changing
(Inside Science) -- For the first time in history, humans have detected a changing magnetic field on a planet other than our own -- Jupiter. The latest revelation could help scientists better understand how a planet’s magnetic field changes over time. → Read More
A Robot Wrote (Part of) This Article
(Inside Science) -- If your eyes have ever glazed over while reading scientific literature, a new system powered by artificial intelligence may be able to help. Researchers from MIT have used neural network-based techniques to summarize research papers filled with technical jargon. They published the results in the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. → Read More
Meet Some Robots with a Softer Touch
(Inside Science) -- When you think of robots you probably picture something made of cold hard metal, or maybe smooth plastic armor. But what about a soft robot with no gears or wires? Katia Bertoldi, an engineer at Harvard University, and her colleagues are all about building robots with squishy and soft materials. She shared some of the designs at a meeting of the American → Read More
The Physics of Peeling Tape
(Inside Science) -- Most of us are familiar with the screeching noise packing tape makes when it's peeled off a box, as well as the frustration of failing to cleanly remove a label from a new purchase. It turns out that the jerky stop-and-go motion we experience when peeling tape occurs at a microscopic level as well.Scientists exploring the physics of peeling tape have → Read More