Physics

16 articles · Latest October 9, 2025

Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez·Oct 9, 2025

Why teach calculus in the age of AI

Why would I learn to compute a derivative by hand when Artificial Intelligence can do it for me? Photo by Shubham Sharan on Unsplash If you’re reading this, you’ve probably taken a...

Peter Kalverla·Dec 10, 2024

Amsterdam as seen by a weather model

Visualizing local climate zones in 3D with the Cityblocks package What sets a weather model apart from a video game? While video games prioritize stunning visuals over strict reali...

Aron·May 4, 2023

Molecular Simulations using Machine Learning, Part 3

24 In the first part of this series we looked at the physics of simulating molecules, and went from quantum mechanics to something that is more efficient to solve, namely density f...

Johan Hidding·Nov 10, 2022

Unweaving legacy code using Entangled

For a Research Software Engineer, dealing with legacy code is seen as a chore: dirty work, but a necessary evil. But the truth is, every time I read someone else’s code, I learn so...

Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez·Oct 12, 2022

Mathematics and biology: a symbiosis?

Lessons learned, from a mathematician among biologists. Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash Preamble In the period 2015–2019, I was hired as a mathematician by a biology d...

Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez·Sep 8, 2022

Fun with elevators: a tutorial

Most modern cell phones contain an accelerometer. And that’s good news if you are curious about all the data around you Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash Some years ago I did a...

Patrick Bos·Jul 19, 2022

What do entropy, entanglement, cosmology, life, and fake news have in common?

Report on the Information Universe 4 conference (Answer to the above question below obligatory excruciatingly long-winded intro!) In the past week, I have rediscovered writing. Wri...

Hanno Spreeuw·Nov 23, 2020

eScience trends from ADASS 2020

eScience trends from ADASS 2020 Scaling up compute and storage resources are not going to be the biggest hurdles. 8 My general feeling about this conference What a delight ADASS (A...

Florian Huber·Feb 11, 2020

Workshop Machine Learning for Research 2020

For one full week we worked with 6 research teams from different disciplines to explore if and how machine learning could help them answer their research question(s). Here is a bri...

eScience

eScience Editorial Team·Dec 9, 2019

Managing the crowd: a big data approach

Crowd disasters have taken many lives. The Love Parade disaster (Duisburg, 2010), the Ellis Park Stadium disaster (Johannesburg, 2001), the PhilSports Stadium stampede (Manila, 200...

eScience Editorial Team·Nov 28, 2019

Optimizing plasma sources through numerical simulation

Optimizing plasma sources through numerical simulation Cold plasma sources are promising devices for the transformation of carbon dioxide into methane and other value-added chemic...

Johan Hidding·Jun 3, 2019

breaking the barrier fluid simulations parallel-in-time.

Parallel flows — Photo by Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash These days computers are growing faster only by adding more cores and increasing parallelism of the programs. As an example,...

Patrick Bos·Aug 6, 2018

floating (point) butterfly effect

Searching for tiny bugs that cause big problems I know it’s a bug, but it’s so pretty… what harm could it do? Last year, I took a few weeks to look into floating point round-off er...

Patrick Bos·Jun 5, 2018

blobs, bumps, clouds and clusters

Statistical fluke or scientific evidence? Definitely a blob. Another earth-shattering discovery is on the horizon. Evidence was found for a new fundamental particle! The times we l...

Ronald van Haren·Aug 23, 2017

predicting temperatures in your street

The next big thing in weather forecasting Example of a high resolution weather forecast at 500m (right) and 100m (left) resolution eScience Research Engineers at the Netherlands eS...

Maarten van Meersbergen·Jul 3, 2017

binge-watching science on youtube the good, the epic and the brilliant

With some help, its algorithms can be trained to find you the good stuff A decade ago, my favorite TV channel used to be the Discovery channel. I spent hours watching shows like Ho...