Those airy, wispy cirrus clouds you're contemplating could be concealing a dirty secret. High in the atmosphere, these icy clouds can take on traveling soot, expelled from diesel trucks, ship boilers, forest fires, and fireplaces. ...
(Phys.org)—Whereas a dry twig can be broken with a single snap, breaking a bamboo chopstick produces more than 400 crackling sounds. In a new study, researchers have found similarities between the complex acoustic emission ...
James Joyce, Julio Cortazar, Marcel Proust, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Umberto Eco. Regardless of the language they were working in, some of the world's greatest writers appear to be, in some respects, constructing fractals. ...
A nature-inspired method to model the reflection of light from the skin of silvery fish and other organisms may be possible, according to Penn State researchers.
(Phys.org)—Most people think of music as more of an art than a science. Although sound is a wave, and can therefore be described by the laws of physics, understanding how certain patterns of sound waves create what we perceive ...
There are certain universal patterns in nature that hold true, regardless of objects' size, species, or surroundings. Take, for instance, the branching fractals seen in both tree limbs and blood vessels, or the surprisingly ...
Some materials that are inherently disordered display unusual conductivity, sometimes behaving like insulators and sometimes like conductors. Physicists have now analysed the conductivity in a special class of disordered ...
Supercomputing simulations at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory could change how researchers understand the internal motions of proteins that play functional, structural and regulatory roles in all ...
OSIRIS, the scientific imaging system of ESA's Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, shows a surface with subtle, but significant color variations.
An atmospheric haze around a faraway planet—like the one which probably shrouded and cooled the young Earth—could show that the world is potentially habitable, or even be a sign of life itself.
