Electric charge disorder: A key to biological order?

Theoretical physicist Ali Naji from the IPM in Tehran and the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues have shown how small random patches of disordered, frozen electric charges can make a difference when they are ...

Raising the prospects for quantum levitation

More than half-a-century ago, the Dutch theoretical physicist Hendrik Casimir calculated that two mirrors placed facing each other in a vacuum would attract. The mysterious force arises from the energy of virtual particles ...

Oxygen molecule survives to enormously high pressures

Using computer simulations, a Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) researcher has shown that the oxygen molecule (O2) is stable up to pressures of 1.9 terapascal, which is about nineteen million times higher than atmosphere pressure. ...

Cosmology in a Petri dish

Scientists have found that micron-size particles which are trapped at fluid interfaces exhibit a collective dynamic that is subject to seemingly unrelated governing laws. These laws show a smooth transitioning from long-ranged ...

Hunting for gaps

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers have developed a new model for the behavior of pedestrians and crowds. It can help to understand and prevent tragic crowd disasters, to develop better architectural designs and new navigation ...

Tangling the microscopic ladder

If a ladder had more than one rung at each step, it would look awkward and would be a bit dangerous to climb. Ladders in the microscopic world were thought to be similar in structure, having only one particle, or rung, in ...

How not to blow up a molecule

High-charge-state ions in a molecule cause strong Coulomb forces, repulsive forces that try to blow its atoms apart. But the research team's crucial finding was that a way to produce only lower charge states in nitrogen molecules ...

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