/ en-us Â鶹ÒùÔº internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Â鶹ÒùÔºics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Oregon Health & Science University, in collaboration with Oregon State University, has discovered the structural organization and protein components of a lipid-transfer complex known as LPD-3. Findings show that LPD-3 contains an internal tunnel lined with lipid molecules, suggesting a possible mechanism for large-scale lipid movement between cellular membranes. /news/2025-04-lipid-tunnel-protein-elegans-revealed.html Cell & Microbiology Molecular & Computational biology Sat, 26 Apr 2025 09:50:01 EDT news664796491 In a new study published in Â鶹ÒùÔºical Review D, Professor Ginestra Bianconi, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, proposes a new framework that could revolutionize our understanding of gravity and its relationship with quantum mechanics. /news/2025-03-gravity-entropy-radical-approach-quantum.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Tue, 04 Mar 2025 10:54:03 EST news660308041 Finding patterns and reducing noise in large, complex datasets generated by the gravitational wave-detecting LIGO facility just got easier, thanks to the work of scientists at the University of California, Riverside. /news/2025-01-machine-approach-observatory-gravitational.html Astronomy Thu, 30 Jan 2025 11:51:05 EST news657460262 The search for quantum gravity has gone on for 100 years, but it is not the only unification challenge in physics. Many of us believe that one day there will be a unification theory—a theory that will reconcile many divergent physical theories. /news/2024-12-alena-tensor-unification-physics.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Tue, 10 Dec 2024 10:30:01 EST news653048532 Viruses that infect bacteria—known as bacteriophages—could be used in a targeted manner to combat bacterial diseases. They also play an important ecological role in global biogeochemical cycles. Recent research by researchers at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) has identified a previously unknown auxiliary metabolic gene in aquatic phages, thereby significantly expanding the previous understanding of these bacterial predators. /news/2024-10-bacteria-auxiliary-metabolic-genes-phages.html Cell & Microbiology Molecular & Computational biology Tue, 15 Oct 2024 16:49:04 EDT news648229741 Researchers at QuTech have found a way to make Majorana particles in a two-dimensional plane. This was achieved by creating devices that exploit the combined material properties of superconductors and semiconductors. The inherent flexibility of this new 2D platform should allow one to perform experiments with Majoranas that were previously inaccessible. The results are published in Nature. /news/2024-06-route-scalable-majorana-qubits.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 12 Jun 2024 14:03:48 EDT news637419823 Entanglement is a widely studied quantum physics phenomenon, in which two particles become linked in such a way that the state of one affects the state of another, irrespective of the distance between them. When studying systems comprised of several strongly interacting particles (i.e., many body systems) in two or more dimensions, numerically predicting the amount of information shared between these particles, a measure known as entanglement entropy (EE), becomes highly challenging. /news/2024-03-method-rnyi-entanglement-entropy-auxiliary.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 28 Mar 2024 06:50:01 EDT news630753225 Particle accelerators hold great potential for semiconductor applications, medical imaging and therapy, and research in materials, energy and medicine. But conventional accelerators require plenty of elbow room—kilometers—making them expensive and limiting their presence to a handful of national labs and universities. /news/2023-11-compact-technology-major-energy-milestone.html Optics & Photonics Plasma Â鶹ÒùÔºics Tue, 28 Nov 2023 09:36:43 EST news620386600 Researchers at the University of Stuttgart have demonstrated that a key ingredient for many quantum computation and communication schemes can be performed with an efficiency that exceeds the commonly assumed upper theoretical limit—thereby opening up new perspectives for a wide range of photonic quantum technologies. /news/2023-09-linear-path-efficient-quantum-technologies.html Optics & Photonics Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Tue, 12 Sep 2023 10:54:04 EDT news613734841 Dust storms are not only a nuisance for anyone trying to keep their house spick and span, they also pose a very real health hazard and are a major ecological concern. Respiratory problems caused by breathing in dust and other airborne particles are one of the main causes of death worldwide. /news/2023-06-storms-ai.html Earth Sciences Environment Fri, 16 Jun 2023 10:34:04 EDT news606130442 Living organisms, ecosystems and the planet Earth are, from a physics point of view, examples of extraordinarily large and complex systems that are not in thermal equilibrium. To physically describe non-equilibrium systems, dynamic density functional theory has been used to date. /news/2023-06-physicists-powerful-alternative-dynamic-density.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Condensed Matter Wed, 07 Jun 2023 14:03:15 EDT news605365391 One of the outstanding challenges in the field of condensed matter physics is finding computationally efficient and simultaneously accurate methods to describe interacting electron systems for crystalline materials. /news/2023-04-super-electron-interactions-efficiently-accurately.html Condensed Matter Thu, 27 Apr 2023 11:28:04 EDT news601813681 Piran Kidambi, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, recently had two papers appear in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces and ACS Nano that respectively focus on a new approach to filter nanoparticles and explore ways to aid decarbonizing transportation. /news/2022-11-explores-nanotech-frontiers-mitigate-biological.html Bio & Medicine Nanomaterials Wed, 09 Nov 2022 08:35:03 EST news587205301 A deep dive into the 5,500 marine RNA virus species scientists recently identified has found that several may help drive carbon absorbed from the atmosphere to permanent storage on the ocean floor. /news/2022-06-viral-dark-mitigate-climate.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 09 Jun 2022 14:00:02 EDT news573978231 If we compare the right to the left hand, we can see these are specular images—that is, like symmetrical shapes reflected in a mirror—and they cannot superimpose on each other. This property is chirality, a feature of the matter that plays with the symmetry of biological structures at different scales, from the DNA molecule to the tissues of the heart muscle. /news/2022-04-reveals-mechanism-chirality-molecules-nanoscale.html Bio & Medicine Nanomaterials Tue, 26 Apr 2022 15:28:06 EDT news570205679 Microfluidic devices are compact testing tools made up of tiny channels carved on a chip, which allow biomedical researchers to test the properties of liquids, particles and cells at a microscale. They are crucial to drug development, diagnostic testing and medical research in areas such as cancer, diabetes and now COVID-19. However, the production of these devices is very labor-intensive, with minute channels and wells that often need to be manually etched or molded into a transparent resin chip for testing. While 3D printing has offered many advantages for biomedical device manufacturing, its techniques were previously not sensitive enough to build layers with the minute detail required for microfluidic devices. Until now. /news/2022-04-3d-technique-game-changer-medical.html Materials Science Tue, 12 Apr 2022 15:58:24 EDT news568997893 Glasses are an indispensable part of everyday life. One of the most important reasons for this is that glass objects can be manufactured almost universally and inexpensively in a wide variety of shapes and sizes using their corresponding melts. Processing in the (viscous) liquid phase offers a versatility that can hardly be achieved with other materials. However, this presupposes that the material from which the glass is made in terms of its chemical composition can be melted at all. /news/2021-09-glasses-unmeltable-compounds.html Materials Science Wed, 29 Sep 2021 11:55:49 EDT news552135346 A change in perspective can work wonders. This has been especially true with respect to the paradigms for explaining material properties using the concept of topology, "ideas that are currently revolutionizing condensed matter physics," according to Tel Aviv University researcher Roni Ilan. While topological physics first emerged in condensed matter physics, the ideas have now spread into many other areas, including optics and photonics, as well as acoustics and other mechanical systems, where things have been getting a little tricky. /news/2020-11-topological-mechanical-metamaterials-newton-law.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 19 Nov 2020 09:39:16 EST news525001142 An infinite chain of hydrogen atoms is just about the simplest bulk material imaginable—a never-ending single-file line of protons surrounded by electrons. Yet a new computational study combining four cutting-edge methods finds that the modest material boasts fantastic and surprising quantum properties. /news/2020-09-infinite-chains-hydrogen-atoms-properties.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Mon, 14 Sep 2020 12:40:02 EDT news519305711 Â鶹ÒùÔºicists have long sought to understand the irreversibility of the surrounding world and have credited its emergence to the time-symmetric, fundamental laws of physics. According to quantum mechanics, the final irreversibility of conceptual time reversal requires extremely intricate and implausible scenarios that are unlikely to spontaneously occur in nature. Â鶹ÒùÔºicists had previously shown that while time-reversibility is exponentially improbable in a natural environment—it is possible to design an algorithm to artificially reverse a time arrow to a known or given state within an IBM quantum computer. However, this version of the reversed arrow-of-time only embraced a known quantum state and is therefore compared to the quantum version of pressing rewind on a video to "reverse the flow of time." /news/2020-08-time-reversal-unknown-quantum-state.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Mon, 10 Aug 2020 09:40:01 EDT news516269275 Simulating computationally complex many-body problems on a quantum simulator has great potential to deliver insights into physical, chemical and biological systems. Â鶹ÒùÔºicists had previously implemented Hamiltonian dynamics but the problem of initiating quantum simulators to a suitable quantum state remains unsolved. In a new report on Science Advances, Meghana Raghunandan and a research team at the institute for theoretical physics, QUEST institute and the Institute for quantum optics in Germany demonstrated a new approach. While the initialization protocol developed in the work was largely independent of the physical realization of the simulation device, the team provided an example of implementing a trapped ion quantum simulator. /news/2020-03-quantum-simulators-sympathetic-cooling.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Fri, 13 Mar 2020 09:32:59 EDT news503310774 Researchers of the University of Basel have developed a new method with which individual isolated molecules can be studied precisely—without destroying the molecule or even influencing its quantum state. This highly sensitive technique for probing molecules is widely applicable and paves the way for a range of new applications in the fields of quantum science, spectroscopy and chemistry, as the journal Science reports. /news/2020-03-perturbation-free-molecules.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 12 Mar 2020 14:00:02 EDT news503225972 Austrian and Chinese scientists have succeeded in teleporting three-dimensional quantum states for the first time. High-dimensional teleportation could play an important role in future quantum computers. /news/2019-08-complex-quantum-teleportation.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Fri, 23 Aug 2019 05:33:15 EDT news485757172 Â鶹ÒùÔºicists at ETH Zurich have developed a new approach to couple quantized gauge fields to ultracold matter. The method might be the basis for a versatile platform to tackle problems ranging from condensed-matter to high-energy physics. /news/2019-08-orrery-quantum-gauge-theory.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Tue, 20 Aug 2019 07:00:14 EDT news485503201 An extensive experiment testing the immune effects of a broad group of lab-designed nucleic acid nanoparticles did not find a strong, uniform immune response, as had been predicted. Instead, the tests found varying and specific responses from different immune cells, depending on each particle's shape and formulation, a finding that may encourage further study of the particles' therapeutic use. /news/2018-07-unraveling-immune-recognition-nucleic-acid.html Bio & Medicine Thu, 26 Jul 2018 11:03:37 EDT news451821801 Scientists don't understand how some materials become superconducting at relatively high temperatures. Leiden physicists have now found a surprising connection with auxiliary black holes. It enables researchers to apply knowledge of black holes to the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity. The new study is published in Nature Â鶹ÒùÔºics. /news/2018-07-similarity-stripy-black-holes-high-temperature.html Superconductivity Mon, 23 Jul 2018 11:00:22 EDT news451294965 Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are exploring how molecular simulations with the latest optimization strategies can create a more systematic way of discovering new materials that exhibit specific, desired properties. /news/2017-05-inverse-spontaneously-self-assembling-materials.html Materials Science Tue, 09 May 2017 11:00:06 EDT news413540393 Lithium-air batteries are considered highly promising technologies for electric cars and portable electronic devices because of their potential for delivering a high energy output in proportion to their weight. But such batteries have some pretty serious drawbacks: They waste much of the injected energy as heat and degrade relatively quickly. They also require expensive extra components to pump oxygen gas in and out, in an open-cell configuration that is very different from conventional sealed batteries. /news/2016-07-lithium-oxygen-battery-greatly-energy-efficiency.html Energy & Green Tech Mon, 25 Jul 2016 11:28:22 EDT news388664890 By using the full power of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer an international team of astronomers has discovered exozodiacal light close to the habitable zones around nine nearby stars. This light is starlight reflected from dust created as the result of collisions between asteroids, and the evaporation of comets. The presence of such large amounts of dust in the inner regions around some stars may pose an obstacle to the direct imaging of Earth-like planets. /news/2014-11-large-telescope-interferometer-exozodiacal.html Astronomy Mon, 03 Nov 2014 06:00:01 EST news334174240 Quantum logic spectroscopy – which is closely linked with the name of the 2012 Nobel prize laureate, David J. Wineland – has been significantly extended: this new method is called "photon-recoil spectroscopy" (PRS). The potential of this method has been demonstrated by the research group led by Piet Schmidt from the QUEST Institute, which is based at the Â鶹ÒùÔºikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, together with colleagues from Leibniz University Hannover. In contrast to the original quantum logic technique, the new method enables the investigation of very fast transitions in atoms or molecules. The results have been published in the current edition of Nature Communications. /news/2014-01-photon-recoil-insight.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 30 Jan 2014 05:00:01 EST news310240797