Everybody who has tried to stack oranges in a box knows that a regular packing of spheres in a flat layer naturally leads to a hexagonal pattern, where each sphere is surrounded by six neighbours in a honeycomb-like fashion. ...
Soft Matter
May 24, 2013
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(Phys.org)—When gluing things together, both surfaces usually need to be dry. Gluing wet surfaces or surfaces under water is a challenge. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, Korean scientists have now introduced a completely ...
Materials Science
Feb 21, 2013
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(Phys.org)—Metals are known for being good electrical conductors. Due to this property, a stationary electric point charge placed outside a metal will cause the electrons in the metal to redistribute in such a way that ...
(Phys.org)—Usually, electrons try to avoid each other due to their electrostatic repulsion. On occasion, however, they can form a pair which has long been known in superconductivity called a "Cooper pair," named after the ...
Condensed Matter
Nov 9, 2012
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(Phys.org)—Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe. This is the "wow" factor behind a device known as a "space-time crystal," a four-dimensional crystal that has periodic ...
General Physics
Sep 24, 2012
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(Phys.org)—Dark energy, a mysterious substance thought to be speeding up the expansion of the Universe is really there, according to a team of astronomers at the University of Portsmouth and LMU University Munich.
Astronomy
Sep 12, 2012
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Biomembranes enclose biological cells like a skin. They also surround organelles that carry out important functions in metabolism and cell division. Scientists have long known in principle how biomembranes are built up, and ...
Biochemistry
Aug 30, 2012
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(Phys.org) -- An international research team has succeeded in directly measuring the strength of shell effects in very heavy elements at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt. The results provide information ...
General Physics
Aug 10, 2012
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(Phys.org) -- In quantum physics physical processes in condensed matter and other many-body systems can often be described with quasiparticles. In Innsbruck, for the first time Rudolf Grimm’s team of physicists has succeeded ...
Quantum Physics
May 23, 2012
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(Phys.org) -- Krzysztof Szalewicz, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware, and Rafal Podeszwa of the University of Silesia Institute of Chemistry in Poland have developed and validated a more accurate ...
Materials Science
May 16, 2012
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