Defying gravity with the Brazil nut effect

Physicists from the University of Utrecht and the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw have observed—for the first time experimentally—the Brazil nut effect in a mixture of charged colloidal particles.

Designer materials to keep plastic out of landfills

Scientists have designed a new material system to overcome one of the biggest challenges in recycling consumer products: mixed-plastic recycling. Their achievement will help enable a much broader range of fully recyclable ...

Wild molecular interactions in a new hydrogen mixture

Hydrogen—the most abundant element in the cosmos—responds to extremes of pressure and temperature differently. Under ambient conditions hydrogen is a gaseous two-atom molecule. As confinement pressure increases, the molecules ...

Physicists discover mechanisms of wrinkle and crumple formation

Smooth wrinkles and sharply crumpled regions are familiar motifs in biological and synthetic sheets, such as plant leaves and crushed foils, say physicists Benny Davidovitch, Narayanan Menon and colleagues at the University ...

Milestone: A methane-metal marriage

(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Arizona scientists have inserted metal atoms into methane gas molecules and obtained a detailed structure of the resulting molecule. The discovery could be a key step in making hydrocarbons ...

Researchers Shed Light on Birth of the First Stars

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the beginning, there were hydrogen and helium. Created in the first three minutes after the Big Bang, these elements gave rise to all other elements in the universe. The factories that made this possible ...

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