How microscopic machines can fail in the blink of an eye

How long can tiny gears and other microscopic moving parts last before they wear out? What are the warning signs that these components are about to fail, which can happen in just a few tenths of a second? Striving to provide ...

Transparent fruit flies

The nervous system of an animal can be studied by cutting it up into thin layers—however this inevitably leads to the destruction of the cellular structures in the tissue. Analyzing complex nerve connections is then hardly ...

A new way to measure energy in microscopic machines

What drives cells to live and engines to move? It all comes down to a quantity that scientists call "free energy," essentially the energy that can be extracted from any system to perform useful work. Without this available ...

Engineers shrink microscope to dime-sized device

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have created an atomic force microscope on a chip, dramatically shrinking the size—and, hopefully, the price tag—of a high-tech device commonly used to characterize material ...

Chemists cook up new nanomaterial and imaging method

A team of chemists led by Northwestern University's William Dichtel has cooked up something big: The scientists created an entirely new type of nanomaterial and watched it form in real time—a chemistry first.

Airless space weathering duplicated in lab environment

Using laboratory instruments typically used to make semiconductor devices, space weathering of airless bodies in the Solar System has been simulated, allowing researchers to better determine the ages of their surfaces, states ...

Comet Wild 2: A window into the birth of the solar system?

Our solar system, and other planetary systems, started as a disk of microscopic dust, gas, and ice around the young Sun. The amazing diversity of objects in the solar system today - the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets ...

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