(Phys.org)—In many ways, water behaves very differently than other liquids do, and with important consequences: It's widely thought that water's unusual properties were essential for the development of life on Earth. One ...
Physicist Richard Feynman highlighted the importance of fluctuations in living matter when he stated, "Everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms." This holds true ...
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 ...
Nanophysics
Jun 13, 2012
14
0
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 ...
Nanophysics
Sep 28, 2010
2
0
A team of researchers has analyzed more than 1 million galaxies to explore the origin of the present-day cosmic structures, as reported in a recent study published in Physical Review D as an Editors' Suggestion.
Astronomy
Dec 22, 2023
37
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Excitations in solids can also be represented mathematically as quasiparticles; for example, lattice vibrations that increase with temperature can be well described as phonons. Mathematically, also quasiparticles can be described ...
Condensed Matter
May 26, 2023
2
694
Gravitational wave detectors have opened a new window to the universe by measuring the ripples in spacetime produced by colliding black holes and neutron stars, but they are ultimately limited by quantum fluctuations induced ...
General Physics
Sep 25, 2020
1
2636
The magnetic structures resulting from a plasma instability predicted by the physicist Erich Weibel about 50 years ago have been evidenced at surprisingly large scales in a laser-driven plasma in the prestigious journal Nature ...
Plasma Physics
Jun 24, 2020
1
98
In a biological system, the ratio of water-to-non-water molecules, known as the hydration level, influences both the arrangement of biomolecules and the strength of the electric interactions that occur between biomolecules, ...
Biochemistry
Dec 14, 2015
0
1333
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 ...
Astronomy
Sep 12, 2013
0
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