Heat behaves in predictable ways: a hot cup of coffee cools, a laptop warms your hands, the sun heats Earth. But at scales thousands of times smaller than a human hair, those rules begin to break down, and scientists are ...
When we think about highly sensitive medical testing, we often imagine a hospital laboratory filled with large instruments, trained technicians, and carefully controlled conditions. This is especially true for optical biosensing, ...
Researchers have recently found a new way to summon useful structures in magnetic materials using light, heat, and electric fields. This new method, described in a new study published in Physical Review Letters, may lead ...
Under a microscope, a bouquet of lollipop-like structures, each smaller than a grain of sand, waves gently in a Petri dish of liquid. Suddenly, they snap together, like the jaws of a Venus flytrap, as a scientist waves a ...
For some time, researchers have assumed that solid materials could gain more useful properties by making their microscopic components more active. Now, a team led by Jack Binysh at the University of Amsterdam has found that ...
Acoustic metamaterials are a fast-evolving family of materials which manipulate sound waves in ever more advanced ways. Now, a team led by Changqing Xu at Nanjing Normal University in China has engineered an acoustic metamaterial, ...
In a new Nature Physics publication, University of Amsterdam researchers introduce human-made materials that spring to life. These 'metamaterials' don't just learn to change shape, but can autonomously adapt their shape-changing ...
A team of NASA researchers is developing new types of optical masks that could help enable the many orders of magnitude of starlight suppression needed for future space observatories to pick out very faint habitable exoplanets ...
Researchers at the University of Konstanz have uncovered a new mechanism of sliding friction: resistance to motion that arises without any mechanical contact, driven purely by collective magnetic dynamics. The study, published ...
A new University of Mississippi study shows that some sound waves don't just move forward—they also move slightly to the side. Understanding this movement could help researchers develop more precise acoustic tools. Likun ...
