The milky, smooth texture of beach glass evokes a history of turbulent transport, rough edges abraded away to produce curves. The same smooth features can be seen in river rocks and dune sands.
Earth Sciences
Mar 28, 2018
0
93
Dropping a smartphone on its glass screen, which is made of atoms jammed together with no discernible order, could result in it shattering. Unlike metals and other crystalline material, glass and many other disordered solids ...
Condensed Matter
Nov 29, 2017
0
54
Each of your cells contains two copies of 23 chromosomes, one inherited from your father and one from your mother. Theoretically, when you create a gamete—a sperm or an egg—each copy has a 50-50 shot at being passed on. ...
Cell & Microbiology
Nov 2, 2017
1
130
Read a few lines of Chaucer or Shakespeare and you'll get a sense of how the English language has changed during the past millennium. Linguists catalogue these changes and work to discern why they happened. Meanwhile, evolutionary ...
Social Sciences
Nov 1, 2017
1
235
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College, have discovered a new topological material which may enable fault-tolerant quantum computing. It is a form ...
Quantum Physics
Jun 29, 2017
0
435
Research from the University of Pennsylvania could shed light on the distribution of one of the most mysterious substances in the universe.
Astronomy
Apr 17, 2017
38
704
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a new technique to study the surface of different types of glass. Using this technique, they discovered a surprising property of the top layer of glasses, which ...
Condensed Matter
Apr 10, 2017
0
1126
Crystals are defined by their repeating, symmetrical patterns and long-range order. Unlike amorphous materials, in which atoms are randomly packed together, the atoms in a crystal are arranged in a predictable way. Quasicrystals ...
Condensed Matter
Oct 25, 2016
0
920
The transistor is the most fundamental building block of electronics, used to build circuits capable of amplifying electrical signals or switching them between the 0s and 1s at the heart of digital computation. Transistor ...
Nanophysics
Apr 7, 2016
3
3963
Oil and water famously don't mix, but finely dispersing one in the other produces a liquid mixture with many useful properties. An emulsion consisting of tiny droplets of one of those liquids immersed in the other is the ...
Materials Science
Jan 27, 2016
0
806
