Students in Manchester University undertook an experiment to determine the identity of the fluid in the container through the use of a mass spectrometer*. When vaporising the liquid using a vacuum ...

For more than a century, schoolbook physics has divided matter into neat categories like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. A wave of recent experiments is now tearing at those boundaries, revealing ...

Solids, liquids and gases. In a solid like this brick, the particles are regularly arranged touching their neighbours and move only by vibrating. This explains why solids have a fixed shape. In a ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Almost everything is made of particles. Particles can be atoms, molecules or ions. Particles behave differently in solids, liquids and gases. The particle model explains the differences between solids ...