Liquids and solutions are complex environments—think, for example, of sugar dissolving in water, where each sugar molecule becomes surrounded by a restless crowd of water molecules. Inside living cells, the picture is even ...
Optics & Photonics
Dec 14, 2025
0
126
Water is all around us, yet its surface layer—home to chemical reactions that shape life on Earth—is surprisingly hard to study. Experiments at SLAC's X-ray laser are bringing it into focus.
Optics & Photonics
Dec 12, 2025
1
110
If you're a soccer fan, you're familiar with this common sight: A penalty kick is in place, with a "wall" of defenders lined up in front of the goal, ready to leap to try to block the ball if it sails overhead.
General Physics
Dec 10, 2025
0
49
A collaboration between the University of Konstanz and Forschungszentrum Jülich has achieved the first fully tunable experimental realization of a long predicted "swarmalator" system. The study, published in Nature Communications, ...
General Physics
Dec 10, 2025
0
26
For numerous fundamental processes of life, the formation of certain protein patterns is essential. Protein pattern formation controlled by molecular switches is—like many processes in nature—far removed from a state of equilibrium.
Soft Matter
Dec 8, 2025
0
40
Some phenomena in our daily lives are so commonplace that we don't realize there could be some very interesting physics behind them. Take a dripping faucet: why does the continuous stream of water from a faucet eventually ...
Soft Matter
Dec 1, 2025
0
129
For nearly a century, scientists have understood how crystalline materials—such as metals and semiconductors—bend without breaking. Their secret lies in tiny, line-like defects called dislocations, which move through an orderly ...
While atmospheric turbulence is a familiar culprit of rough flights, the chaotic movement of turbulent flows remains an unsolved problem in physics. To gain insight into the system, a team of researchers used explainable ...
General Physics
Nov 20, 2025
0
69
Physics is often about recognizing patterns, sometimes repeated across vastly different scales. For instance, moons orbit planets in the same way planets orbit stars, which in turn orbit the center of a galaxy.
Soft Matter
Nov 19, 2025
0
39
Researchers at Rice University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have unveiled a physics-based model of magnetic resonance relaxation that bridges molecular-scale dynamics with macroscopic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) ...
Soft Matter
Nov 18, 2025
0
124
