Pulsating dust cloud dynamics modeled

The birth of stars is an event that eludes intuitive understanding. It is the collapse of dense molecular clouds under their own weight that offers the best sites of star formation. Now, Pralay Kumar Karmakar from the Department ...

Controlling skyrmions for better electronics

Physicists at the University of Hamburg managed for the first time to individually write and delete single skyrmions, a knot-like magnetic entity. Such vortex-shaped magnetic structures exhibit unique properties which make ...

Observation of skyrmions in a ferromagnet with centrosymmetry

Researchers from the National Institute of Materials Science (NIMS) have used Lorentz electron microscopy to show that magnetic skyrmions are spontaneously formed as nanomagnetic clusters in a ferromagnetic manganese oxide ...

Improved X-ray microscopy makes fluctuations visible

X-ray microscopy requires radiation of extremely high quality. In order to obtain sharp images instrument and sample must stay absolutely immobile even at the nanometer scale during the recording. Researchers at the Technische ...

Ancient effect harnessed to produce electricity from waste heat

A phenomenon first observed by an ancient Greek philosopher 2,300 years ago has become the basis for a new device designed to harvest the enormous amounts of energy wasted as heat each year to produce electricity. The first-of-its-kind ...

Competition is at the root of diversity in rainforests: study

Another attractive theory falls foul of the facts. A census of trees in rainforests on three continents has confirmed that competition plays a central role in structuring communities. This contradicts the so-called neutral ...

Tiny generators turn waste heat into power

The second law of thermodynamics is a big hit with the beret-wearing college crowd because of its implicit existential crunch. The tendency of a closed systems to become increasingly disordered if no energy is added or removed ...

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