Research reveals how order first appears in liquid crystals

Liquid crystals undergo a peculiar type of phase change. At a certain temperature, their cigar-shaped molecules go from a disordered jumble to a more orderly arrangement in which they all point more or less in the same direction. ...

A new way to make biaxial nematic phase liquid crystals

A team of researchers from the University of Colorado in the U.S. and Université Paris-Saclay, in France has developed a new way to make biaxial nematic phase liquid crystals. In their paper published in the journal Science, ...

Ingredients for life revealed in meteorites that fell to Earth

Two wayward space rocks, which separately crashed to Earth in 1998 after circulating in our solar system's asteroid belt for billions of years, share something else in common: the ingredients for life. They are the first ...

Researchers demonstrate how to control liquid crystal patterns

When Lisa Tran set out to investigate patterns in liquid crystals, she didn't know what to expect. When she first looked through the microscope, she saw dancing iridescent spheres with fingerprint-like patterns etched into ...

Molecules move faster near sticky surfaces

Molecules move faster as they get closer to adhesive surfaces, but this effect is not permanent. Such is the puzzling conclusion of a study published in Physical Review Letters, carried out by Simone Napolitano and his colleagues ...

'Switchable' smart windows reduce energy consumption significantly

Smart windows that act as blinds in the summer and let all the sunlight through in the winter. That's the idea of the reflective windows Hitesh Khandelwal developed during his doctoral research at TU/e, that are able to reflect ...

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