Actively reducing noise by ionizing air

Did you know that wires can be used to ionize air to make a loudspeaker? Simply put, it's possible to generate sound by creating an electric field in a set of parallel wires, aka a plasma transducer, strong enough to ionize ...

Preserving pine forests by understanding beetle flight

The mountain pine beetle is one of the main causes of tree mortality in the pine forests of North America. For example, the insect has killed thousands of acres of pine forest in British Columbia and Alberta, and as a result, ...

X-rays reveal electronic details of nickel-based superconductors

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered new details about the electrons in a nickel-based family of superconducting materials. The research, described in two papers ...

How space storms miscue train signals

In July 1982, train signals in Sweden misfired and erroneously turned red. The culprit, believe it or not, was a space storm that started 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) away.

page 14 from 40