A collaboration of nuclear theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Temple University, Adam Mickiewicz University of Poland, and the University of Bonn, Germany, has used supercomputers to predict the spatial distributions of charges, momentum, and other properties of "up" and "down" quarks within protons. The results, just published in Physical Review D, revealed key differences in the characteristics of the up and down quarks.

Greenland's ice sheet has been melting at an accelerated rate over recent decades, which may have resulted in a 1.4 mm/year rise in sea level. It has three glaciers with a floating tongue (floating ice attached to a glacier emerging into the sea) remaining, with Nioghalvfjerdsbrae (located at 79 degrees latitude north so colloquially termed 79NG) being the focus of a new study reported in The Cryosphere regarding the effects of climate change on its decline.

A common metal paper clip will stick to a magnet. Scientists classify such iron-containing materials as ferromagnets. A little over a century ago, physicists Albert Einstein and Wander de Haas reported a surprising effect with a ferromagnet. If you suspend an iron cylinder from a wire and expose it to a magnetic field, it will start rotating if you simply reverse the direction of the magnetic field.

Newly developed atomic engineering techniques have opened exciting opportunities for enabling ferroelectric behavior in high-k dielectrics, materials that have a high dielectric constant (i.e., kappa or k) compared to silicon. This could in turn inform the development of more advanced CMOS-based technology with a broader range of functions or properties.

Rice University physicists have shown that immutable topological states, which are highly sought for quantum computing, can be entangled with other manipulable quantum states in some materials.