Discovery Brings Scientists One Step Closer to Solving Century-Old Cosmic Ray Mystery
For more than a century, astrophysicists have tried to determine the origin of extremely energetic particles, which are up to a million times more energetic than anything achieved by the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.
Waves in the Maze of No Return
A bad wireless reception, the noise in the radio signal or poor visibility in the fog - all these annoyances have to do with the fact that waves such as visible light or microwave signals are deflected and reflected by numerous disordered obstacles.
Rensselaer Researchers Learn to Control Electron Spin at Room Temperature To Make Devices More Efficient and Faster
As our devices become smaller, faster, more energy efficient, and capable of holding larger amounts of data, spintronics may continue that trajectory. Whereas electronics is based on the flow of electrons, spintronics is based on the spin of electrons.
Room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensation and vortex lasing arrays in artificial quasiparticle lattices
Quantized vortices play a pivotal role in the interpretation of quantum phase transitions and strongly correlated physics involving the underlying confluence of superfluids, Bose-Einstein condensates, and superconductors, thus it is crucial to study quantum vortices and their applications.
Department of Energy Announces $78 Million for Research in High Energy Physics
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $78 million in funding for 58 research projects that will spur new discoveries in high energy physics. The projects--housed at 44 colleges and universities across 22 states--are exploring the fundamental science about the universe that also underlies technological advancements in medicine, computing, energy technologies, manufacturing, national security, and more.
Celebrating CUR Division 2022 Awardees
The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) recognizes its divisional award recipients for the first half of 2022. CUR's community aligns across its thirteen divisions. The divisions work to recognize the best of the undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative inquiry community.
PPPL scientists propose solution to a long-puzzling fusion problem
New finding could solve a paradox in spherical tokamak fusion experiments.
Discovering an Unsuspected Hurdle for Stellarator Fusion Facilities
Story reveals a potentially critical issue for stellarator designers to avoid.
Synchronization of Firearm Background Check Data Reveals Acquisition Patterns
In Chaos, researchers explore the factors driving background checks, and whether coordination between U.S. states may exist and if one state exerts influence over others in terms of enacting gun laws or acquiring firearms. They researchers constructed a rigorous mathematical approach to interpret the patterning of firearm background check data and found these patterns of frequency oscillations are different at various time points. This suggests states may have interacted differently with each other during the terms of Bush, Obama, and Trump.
From Nuclei to Neutron Stars
How big is an atomic nucleus? How does the size of a nucleus relate to a neutron star? These tantalizing questions in physics were explored in a pair of experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Now, a 2021 doctoral dissertation describing those experiments has just earned Devi Lal Adhikari the prestigious annual Jefferson Science Associates (JSA) Thesis Prize.
Statistics Unlock Secrets of Particles, Pandemics, and More
What do physicists exploring the fundamental particles that make up our universe and doctors tracking COVID-19 cases have in common? Statistics! Both sift through enormous amounts of data looking for patterns. Now members of this not-so-unlikely partnership are spreading the word about the power of statistics to math and science teachers and students.
Biomicrofluidics Announces Low-Cost, 3D-Printed Microfluidic Bioreactor as 2021 Best Paper Award Recipient
The journal Biomicrofluidics has selected Ikram Khan as the winner of its 2021 Best Paper award. The designation highlights significant contributions by emerging authors in microfluidics and nanofluidics and is determined by an expert panel of judges. In the winning paper, "A low-cost 3D printed microfluidic bioreactor and imaging chamber for live-organoid imaging," the authors developed a system capable of supporting brain organoid growth while allowing long-term live imaging and drug delivery support. Organoids, or biological systems grown in vitro, act as important models for studying normal and diseased development.
The Life Puzzle: The Location of Land on a Planet Can Affect Its Habitability
New climate models have found that the amount and location of land on a planet's surface can significantly impact its habitability. Astronomers have identified substantial differences in surface temperature, sea ice and water vapour across a planet's surface for different land configurations.
Nanoparticles Can Save Historic Buildings
Buildings made of porous rock can weather over the years. Now, for the first time, scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) have studied in detail how silicate nanoparticles can help save them.
Study Provides New Insights About Surface, Structure of Asteroid Bennu
When NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected samples from asteroid Bennu's surface in 2020, forces measured during the interaction provided scientists with a direct test of the poorly understood near-subsurface physical properties of rubble-pile asteroids. Now, a Southwest Research Institute-led study has characterized the layer just below the asteroid's surface as composed of weakly bound rock fragments containing twice the void space as the overall asteroid.
Scientists Capture a 'Quantum Tug' Between Neighboring Water Molecules
Scientists suggest that water's so-called "proton quantum effect" may be at the heart of many of the liquid's strange properties. In this experiment with ultrafast electron diffraction, scientists observed how the hydrogen atoms in water molecules tug and push neighboring molecules when water is excited with laser light. This marks the first time that scientists have directly observed this effect in water.
Berkeley Lab Researchers Record Successful Startup of LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Detector at Sanford Underground Research Facility
Deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), an innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detector - the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) - has passed a check-out phase of startup operations and delivered first results.
Led by Columbia Engineering, Researchers Build Longest, Highly Conductive Molecular Nanowire
Columbia researchers announced today that they have built a nanowire that is 2.6 nanometers long, shows an unusual increase in conductance as the wire length increases, and has quasi-metallic properties. Its excellent conductivity holds great promise for the field of molecular electronics, enabling electronic devices to become even tinier.
UChicago Scientists Invent 'Quantum Flute' That Can Make Particles of Light Move Together
University of Chicago physicists have invented a "quantum flute" that, like the Pied Piper, can coerce particles of light to move together in a way that's never been seen before.
Elucidating the Law of Vortex Diffusion in Quantum Turbulence
A research group of Professor Makoto Tsubota and Specially Appointed Assistant Professor Satoshi Yui, both from the Graduate School of Science and the Nambu Yoichiro Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Osaka Metropolitan University, in cooperation with their colleagues from Florida State University and Keio University, conducted a systematic numerical study of vortex diffusion in quantum turbulence in superfluid helium-4 (He II) at extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero (−273 deg.C), and compared the results with experimental observations.
Elucidating the Law of Vortex Diffusion in Quantum Turbulence
A research group of Professor Makoto Tsubota and Specially Appointed Assistant Professor Satoshi Yui, both from the Graduate School of Science and the Nambu Yoichiro Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Osaka Metropolitan University, in cooperation with their colleagues from Florida State University and Keio University, conducted a systematic numerical study of vortex diffusion in quantum turbulence in superfluid helium-4 (He II) at extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero (−273 deg.C), and compared the results with experimental observations.
Gecko feet are coated in an ultra-thin layer of lipids that help them stay sticky
Geckos are famous for having grippy feet that allow them to scale vertical surfaces with ease. They get this seeming superpower from millions of microscopic, hairlike structures on their toes.
Researchers use X-rays to decode complex piece of cellular machinery, atom by atom
A research team led by Caltech spent nearly 20 years determining X-ray structures, one by one, to create a map of the nuclear pore complex, one of the largest and most complex pieces of cellular machinery.
10 Years Later, Higgs Boson Discoverers Publish Refined Measurements
Particle physics changed forever on July 4, 2012. That was the day the two major physics experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CMS and ATLAS, jointly announced the discovery of a particle that matched the properties of the Higgs boson--a particle theorized decades earlier. The discovery cemented the final piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. Now physicists from the CMS and ATLAS Collaborations detail high-precision results from their latest Higgs boson studies.