How airplanes counteract St. Elmo's Fire during thunderstorms

At the height of a thunderstorm, the tips of cell towers, telephone poles, and other tall, electrically conductive structures can spontaneously emit a flash of blue light. This electric glow, known as a corona discharge, ...

Cracking the mystery of perfect superconductor efficiency

In 1911, physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes aimed to lower mercury's temperature to as close to absolute zero as possible. He hoped to win a disagreement with Lord Kelvin, who thought metals would stop conducting electricity ...

Printing atom by atom: Lab explores nanoscale 3D printing

It takes chemist Liaisan Khasanova less than a minute to turn an ordinary silica glass tube into a printing nozzle for a very special 3D printer. The chemist inserts the capillary tube—which is just one millimeter thick—into ...

Matter and antimatter seem to respond equally to gravity

As part of an experiment to measure—to an extremely precise degree—the charge-to-mass ratios of protons and antiprotons, the RIKEN-led BASE collaboration at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, has found that, within the uncertainty ...

Iodine successfully tested in satellite ion thrusters

A team of researchers from ThrustMe, working with colleagues from Sorbonne Université, has successfully tested the use of iodine as an ionizing agent in an ion-thrusting spacecraft engine. In their paper published in the ...

Rare earth ions in a crystal become candidate for a quantum memory

(Phys.org) —A promising material is lining itself up as a candidate for a quantum memory. A team at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen is the first to succeed in performing high-resolution spectroscopy ...

Electron slow motion: Ion physics on the femtosecond scale

How do different materials react to the impact of ions? This is a question that plays an important role in many areas of research—for example, in nuclear fusion research, when the walls of the fusion reactor are bombarded ...

New membrane to make fresh water

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and their collaborators have developed a new membrane, whose structure was inspired by a protein from algae, for electrodialysis that could be used to provide fresh water for farming ...

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