Physicists make quantum leap in understanding life's nanoscale machinery
A diagnostic technique that can detect tiny molecules signalling the presence of cancer could be on the horizon.
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Study finds way to pack more data in single acoustic beam for underwater communications
A new strategy for sending acoustic waves through water could potentially open up the world of high-speed communications activities underwater, including scuba diving, remote ocean monitoring, and deep-sea exploration.
Water exists as two different liquids
We normally consider liquid water as disordered with the molecules rearranging on a short time scale around some average structure. Now, however, scientists at Stockholm University have discovered two phases of the liquid ...
X-ray technique provides a new window into exotic properties of an atomically thin material
An international team of researchers, working at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley, fabricated an atomically thin material and measured its exotic and durable ...
One billion suns: World's brightest laser sparks new behavior in light
Physicists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are seeing an everyday phenomenon in a new light.
Study reveals mysterious equality with which grains pack it in
At the moment they come together, the individual grains in materials like sand and snow appear to have exactly the same probability of combining into any one of their many billions of possible arrangements, researchers have ...
Moisture-responsive 'robots' crawl with no external power source
Using an off-the-shelf camera flash, researchers turned an ordinary sheet of graphene oxide into a material that bends when exposed to moisture. They then used this material to make a spider-like crawler and claw robot that ...
Electrocaloric refrigerator offers alternative way to cool everything from food to computers
(Phys.org)—Researchers have built an electrocaloric refrigerator the size of a beverage coaster that can generate a temperature difference of about 2 K between the hot and cold ends of the device. The cooling mechanism, ...
A functional prototype nonvolatile ferroelectric domain wall memory
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from institutions in Australia, the U.S. and China has developed a functional prototype nonvolatile ferroelectric domain wall memory. In their paper published on the open access site Science ...
Tiny magnetic tremors unlock exotic superconductivity
Deep within solids, individual electrons zip around on a nanoscale highway paved with atoms. For the most part, these electrons avoid one another, kept in separate lanes by their mutual repulsion. But vibrations in the atomic ...
Making ferromagnets stronger by adding non-magnetic elements
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory discovered that they could functionalize magnetic materials through a thoroughly unlikely method, by adding amounts of the virtually non-magnetic element scandium ...
Atomic imperfections move quantum communication network closer to reality
An international team led by the University of Chicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering has discovered how to manipulate a weird quantum interface between light and matter in silicon carbide along wavelengths used in ...
Team launches 'comb and copter' system to map atmospheric gases
Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder have demonstrated a new mobile, ground-based system that could scan and map atmospheric gas plumes over kilometer ...
Magnetic nanoknots evoke Lord Kelvin's vortex theory of atoms
(Phys.org)—In the late 1800s when scientists were still trying to figure out what exactly atoms are, one of the leading theories, proposed by Lord Kelvin, was that atoms are knots of swirling vortices in the aether. Although ...
Physicists settle debate over how exotic quantum particles form
New research by physicists at the University of Chicago settles a longstanding disagreement over the formation of exotic quantum particles known as Efimov molecules.
A single electron's tiny leap sets off 'molecular sunscreen' response
In experiments at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, scientists were able to see the first step of a process that protects a DNA building block called thymine from sun damage: When it's hit with ...
Peering at the crystal structure of lithium
Elemental metals usually form simple, close-packed crystalline structures. Though lithium (Li) is considered a typical simple metal, its crystal structure at ambient pressure and low temperature remains unknown.
Piling on pressure solves enduring mystery about metal's makeup
Scientists have solved a decades-old puzzle about a widely used metal, thanks to extreme pressure experiments and powerful supercomputing.
Quantum thermometer or optical refrigerator?
In an arranged marriage of optics and mechanics, physicists have created microscopic structural beams that have a variety of powerful uses when light strikes them. Able to operate in ordinary, room-temperature environments, ...
A 100-year-old physics problem has been solved
At EPFL, researchers challenge a fundamental law and discover that more electromagnetic energy can be stored in wave-guiding systems than previously thought. The discovery has implications in telecommunications. Working around ...
New screen coating makes reading in sunlight a lot easier—the secret? Moth eyes
Screens on even the newest phones and tablets can be hard to read outside in bright sunlight. Inspired by the nanostructures found on moth eyes, researchers have developed a new antireflection film that could keep people ...
Ultra-thin camera creates images without lenses
Traditional cameras—even those on the thinnest of cell phones—cannot be truly flat due to their optics: lenses that require a certain shape and size in order to function. At Caltech, engineers have developed a new camera ...
Self-assembling reagents with tunable colors and brightness enable highly multiplexed tagging, microscopic imaging
Biomedical researchers are understanding the functions of molecules within the body's cells in ever greater detail by increasing the resolution of their microscopes. However, what's lagging behind is their ability to simultaneously ...
New 3-D display takes the eye fatigue out of virtual reality
There is a great deal of excitement around virtual reality (VR) headsets that display a computer-simulated world and augmented reality (AR) glasses that overlay computer-generated elements with the real world. Although AR ...
Problem of wheeled suitcases wobbling explained
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers at Universite Paris-Diderot has uncovered the reason for wobbling of wheeled suitcases. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, the group explains the physics behind ...
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Seeing the forest through the trees with a new LiDAR system
Shortly after lasers were first developed in the 1960s, LiDAR—whose name originated as a combination of "light" and "radar"—capitalized on the newly unique precision they offered for measuring both time and distance. ...
Solution to distortion effect in STM scanning
STM scanning experiments on poorly conducting materials are challenging, and can cause a distortion effect. A new model corrects for this effect, allowing physicists to better study materials in their quest to understand ...
Using mathematical methods to study complex biological networks
Complex biological processes such as metabolism often involve thousands of compounds coupled by chemical reactions. These process chains are described by researchers as chemical reaction networks. Researchers from the University ...
Digital to analog convertors generate bipolar voltages when coupled to a polarity switchable double flux amplifier
Digital to analog convertors (DACs) are devices that convert digital, typically binary signals to outputs in the form of voltage. The voltage generated can then be used to produce light, as in video and television or sound, ...
Robotic vision sensors based on light sensitive bacterial proteins
High performance motion detection technology is critical as the 'eyes' of advanced robotic systems for applications including factory management and autonomous machines in home environments. Traditional robot vision devices ...
Ultra-compact phase modulators based on graphene plasmons
Modulating the amplitude and phase of light is a key ingredient for many of applications such as wavefront shaping, transformation optics, phased arrays, modulators and sensors. Performing this task with high efficiency and ...
X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy under real ambient pressure conditions
Researchers at Institute for Molecular Science (IMS), Innovation Research Center for Fuel Cells, University of Electro-Communications, Research Center for Materials Science, Nagoya University, and JASRI (Japan Synchrotron ...
Fluid mechanics of table tennis balls—discovery of 'spin-crisis'
Research conducted by Takeshi Miyazaki and colleagues at the Complex Fluids Lab at UEC, Tokyo, covers environmental fluid mechanics in massive systems such as flight of projectiles and motion of vortices in the Earth's atmosphere ...
The crown jewel of the HL-LHC magnets
While the LHC is at the start of a new season of data taking, scientists and engineers around the world are working hard to develop brand new magnets for the LHC upgrade, the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC).
New ultrasound techniques for peering inside bony structures
Ultrasound—sound with frequencies higher than those audible to humans—is commonly used in diagnostic imaging of the body's soft tissues, including muscles, joints, tendons and internal organs. A technology called high-intensity ...
Artificial iris responds to light like the human eye
An artificial iris manufactured from intelligent, light-controlled polymer material can react to incoming light in the same ways as the human eye. The iris was developed by the Smart Photonic Materials research group from ...
Using body noise to improve cancer detection
Elastography, sometimes referred as seismology of the human body, is an emerging technology used to enhance medical ultrasound imaging. It does this by measuring the elasticity of biological tissue to diagnose cancer or liver ...
Neutron-rich nucleus shapeshifts between a rugby ball and a discus
An international team led by scientists from IPN Orsay (CNRS/Université Paris-Sud), CEA, and RIKEN (Japan) has performed the first spectroscopy of the extremely neutron-rich isotopes krypton 98 and 100. This experiment showed ...
Camera captures microscopic holograms at femtosecond speeds
Researchers from ITMO University have built a setup for recording holograms of tiny objects like living cells at femtosecond speeds. The new method reconstructs the phase topography of a sample according to deformations that ...
Injector 2—a pre-accelerator for protons
As fundamental building blocks of matter, protons are a part of all things that surround us. At the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, however, they step out of their usual role and are deployed to generate other particles, namely ...
Smooth propagation of spin waves using gold
Assistant Professor Taichi Goto at Toyohashi University of Technology elucidated the noise generation mechanism of the spin wave (SW), the wave of a magnetic moment transmitted through magnetic oxide, and established a way ...
3-D virus cam catches germs red-handed
Before germs like viruses can make you sick, they first have to make a landing on one of your cells—Mars Rover style—and then punch their way inside.
Deceleration of runaway electrons paves the way for fusion power
Fusion power has the potential to provide clean and safe energy that is free from carbon dioxide emissions. However, imitating the solar energy process is a difficult task to achieve. Two young plasma physicists at Chalmers ...
Leaping lizards: Research tests the limits of gecko adhesion
Many geckos inhabit trees, often living high in the canopy. Relying on their incredible adhesive strength to help them break their fall, they jump from trees, and land on either leaves or relatively smooth tree trunks. How ...
Groundbreaking discovery confirms existence of orbiting supermassive black holes
For the first time ever, astronomers at The University of New Mexico say they've been able to observe and measure the orbital motion between two supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of light years from Earth - a ...
Cotton candy capillaries lead to circuit boards that dissolve when cooled
Building transient electronics is usually about doing something to make them stop working: blast them with light, soak them with acid, dunk them in water.
A possible explanation for why no intermediate sized black holes have been found
(Phys.org)—A pair of researchers, one with the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel the other with Princeton University in the U.S. has come up with a possible explanation for the inability of space scientists to find ...
Galaxy NGC 1132 has a disturbed hot halo, study finds
(Phys.org)—A new study recently published on arXiv.org reveals that the fossil group galaxy NGC 1132 (also known as UGC 2359) has a disturbed and asymmetrical hot halo. The findings provide new insights into the formation ...
Biologist looks at butterflies to help solve human infertility
When insects skip the light fandango their romantic foreplay often involves some pretty crazy things like hypnotic dance moves and flashy colors. In some species it ends with a complex ejaculate package that does more than ...
Collapse of the European ice sheet caused chaos
Scientists have reconstructed in detail the collapse of the Eurasian ice sheet at the end of the last ice age. The big melt wreaked havoc across the European continent, driving home the original Brexit 10,000 years ago.
Directed gene-copy variation: The key to conquering new environments
A study of yeast reveals new mechanism that allows cells to adapt to environmental changes more rapidly by accelerating genetic changes around genes that boost fitness, publishing 27 June in the open access journal PLOS Biology, ...
Distant earthquakes can cause underwater landslides
New research finds large earthquakes can trigger underwater landslides thousands of miles away, weeks or months after the quake occurs.
New cyberattack wallops Europe; spreads more slowly in US (Update 2)
A new and highly virulent outbreak of data-scrambling software caused disruption across the world Tuesday. Following a similar attack in May , the fresh assault paralyzed some hospitals, government offices and major multinational ...
The revolutionary technologies that power and cool the Parker Solar Probe
As NASA's Parker Solar Probe spacecraft begins its first historic encounter with the sun's corona in late 2018—flying closer to our star than any other mission in history—a revolutionary cooling system will keep its solar ...
Genetic engineering tool generates antioxidant-rich purple rice
Researchers in China have developed a genetic engineering approach capable of delivering many genes at once and used it to make rice endosperm—seed tissue that provides nutrients to the developing plant embryo—produce ...
Ozone recovery may be delayed by unregulated chemicals
Recent increases in an unregulated ozone-depleting substance, could delay recovery of Antarctic ozone levels by 5-30 years, depending on emissions scenarios.
Friend or foe? Manganese concentration in drinking water needs attention, researchers say
In the world of heavy metal poisoning, arsenic may have found a sidekick—and it's one that needs more research to understand its influence on human health, according to Kansas State University researchers.
Scientists illuminate structures vital to virus replication
In the fight against the viruses that invade everyday life, seeing and understanding the battleground is essential. Scientists at the Morgridge Institute for Research have, for the first time, imaged molecular structures ...
New photoacoustic technique detects gases at parts-per-quadrillion level
A team of researchers has found a way to detect trace gases down to concentrations at the parts-per-quadrillion level using a new variation on the photoacoustic effect, a technique that measures the sound generated when light ...
Self-affirmation plays role in minority students' college success
Having minority middle school students write a series of self-affirmation exercises focusing on core values improved the odds that the students would pursue college tracks in school, according to Stanford scholars.
As climate stirs Arctic sea ice faster, pollution tags along
A warming climate is not just melting the Arctic's sea ice; it is stirring the remaining ice faster, increasing the odds that ice-rafted pollution will foul a neighboring country's waters, says a new study.
Apes only provide food to conspecifics that have previously assisted them
For us humans, it goes without saying that we reward others as an indication of the gratitude we feel towards them. Scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and for Mathematics in the Sciences ...
Conducting shell for bacteria
Under anaerobic conditions, certain bacteria can produce electricity. This behavior can be exploited in microbial fuel cells, with a special focus on wastewater treatment schemes. A weak point is the dissatisfactory power ...
What makes stem cells into perfect allrounders
Researchers from the University of Zurich and the University Hospital Zurich have discovered the protein that enables natural embryonic stem cells to form all body cells. In the case of embryonic stem cells maintained in ...
The dust storm microbiome
Israel is subjected to sand and dust storms from several directions: northeast from the Sahara, northwest from Saudi Arabia and southwest from the desert regions of Syria. The airborne dust carried in these storms affects ...
New way to form close double black holes
A team of three Dutch astronomers from the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University found a new way to form two black holes that orbit each other for quite a while and then merge. Their publication with computer simulations ...
From bug to drug—tick saliva could be key to treating heart disease
Proteins found in tick saliva could be used to treat a potentially fatal form of heart disease, according to new Oxford University research.
Machine learning approach could aid the design of industrial processes for drug manufacturing
When organic chemists identify a useful chemical compound—a new drug, for instance—it's up to chemical engineers to determine how to mass-produce it.
EU fines Google a record 2.4 billion euros in antitrust case (Update)
After a seven-year legal battle, European authorities came down hard on Google on Tuesday for taking advantage of its dominance in online searches to direct customers to its own businesses, fining the tech giant a record ...
Lightning sparking more boreal forest fires
A new NASA-funded study finds that lightning storms were the main driver of recent massive fire years in Alaska and northern Canada, and that these storms are likely to move farther north with climate warming, potentially ...
New gene-editing technique could drive out mosquito-borne disease
Scientists at UC Berkeley and UC Riverside have demonstrated a way to edit the genome of disease-carrying mosquitoes that brings us closer to suppressing them on a continental scale.
Chimpanzee 'super strength' and what it might mean in human muscle evolution
Since at least the 1920s, anecdotes and some studies have suggested that chimpanzees are "super strong" compared to humans, implying that their muscle fibers, the cells that make up muscles, are superior to humans.
Greenland now a major driver of rising seas: study
Ocean levels rose 50 percent faster in 2014 than in 1993, with meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet now supplying 25 percent of total sea level increase compared with just five percent 20 years earlier, researchers reported ...
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