According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase over time. Everything around us follows this law; for instance, the melting of ice, a room becoming ...

Physicists have upended a foundational law of materials science by heating gold to over 19,000°C — more than 14 times its ...

Entropy is one of the most useful concepts in science but also one of the most confusing. This article serves as a brief introduction to the various types of entropy that can be used to quantify the ...

In the tug-of-war between order and chaos within multielemental carbides, entropy eventually claims victory over enthalpy by ...

Plant ecologists have proposed a variety of optimization theories to explain the adaptive behaviour and evolution of plants from the perspective of natural selection ('survival of the fittest').