The cell's internal skeleton undergoes constant restructuring. LMU physicists now show that its constituent proteins can be efficiently transported to their sites of action by diffusion – provided they can be arrested when ...
Researchers at DESY have used high-speed photography to film one of the candidates for the magnetic data storage devices of the future in action. The film was taken using an X-ray microscope and shows magnetic vortices being ...
Throughout life's history on earth, biological diversity has gone through ebbs and flows—periods of rapid evolution and of dramatic extinctions. We know this, at least in part, through the fossil record of marine invertebrates ...
Famously described as 'the deepest problem in solid state physics' by Nobel Laureate, Philip Andersen, the glass transition, by which a liquid transforms into a solid without freezing, is shedding its mystique.
Janus was a Roman god with two distinct faces. Thousands of years later, he inspired material scientists working on asymmetrical microscopic spheres—with both a magnetic and a non-magnetic half—called Janus particles. ...
Graphene is the thinnest material ever produced, with the thickness of a single atomic layer. Thinner than a billionth of a meter, it is able to efficiently absorb light from the visible to the infrared through the photoexcitation ...
Solitary waves – known as solitons – appear in many forms. Perhaps the most recognizable is the tsunami, which forms following a disruption on the ocean floor and can travel, unabated, at high speeds for hundreds of miles.
Systems containing self-propelling particles, such as bacteria or artificial colloidal particles, are always out of equilibrium but may show interesting transitions between different states, reminiscent of phase transitions ...
Researchers have explored the evolution of systems of interacting spins, as they transition from random to orderly alignments. Through new simulations, they show that this evolution can be investigated by measuring the changing ...
A Russian physicist and his international colleagues studied a quantum point contact (QCP) between two conductors with external oscillating fields applied to the contact. They found that, for some types of contacts, an increase ...
