Some materials behave unexpectedly. They crack differently than expected, or react in ways that are hard to explain. The answer often lies in their atomic structure. Is it neatly arranged, as in a crystal, or disordered, ...
Light is an unusually rich carrier of information. Its direction of travel, wavelength, and polarization can all be used to encode signals or images. Yet controlling these properties independently remains difficult, especially ...
Adelaide University researchers have shown that pairing sniffer dogs with a simple air-sampling device could dramatically improve the detection of illegally trafficked wildlife hidden inside shipping containers.
In some solid materials under specific conditions, mutual Coulomb interactions shape electrons into many-body correlated states, such as Wigner crystals, which are essentially solids made of electrons. So far, the Wigner ...
Superionic water—the hot, black and strangely conductive form of ice that exists in the center of distant planets—was predicted in the 1980s and first recreated in a laboratory in 2018. With each closer look, it continues ...
Right now, the debate about consciousness often feels frozen between two entrenched positions. On one side sits computational functionalism, which treats cognition as something you can fully explain in terms of abstract information ...
For people living near volcanoes, danger goes well beyond lava flows and clouds of ash. Some explosive eruptions can lead to dramatic collapses of the sides of a volcano, like those at Mount St. Helens, Washington, and Anak ...
Whether space-time exists should be neither controversial nor even conceptually challenging, given the definitions of "space-time," "events" and "instants." The idea that space-time exists is no more viable than the outdated ...
Rice University researchers used a focused electron beam to pattern device functions with submicron precision directly into an ultrathin crystal. The approach produced traces narrower than the width of a DNA helix that glow ...
At a humming factory in the Spanish town of O Carballino, workers sling dozens of limp octopuses into a metal cauldron, wincing as strings of slime splatter their aprons. Nearby, others slice tentacles and pack them into ...
