/ 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. Solving life's great mysteries often requires detective work, using observed outcomes to determine their cause. For instance, nuclear physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility analyze the aftermath of particle interactions to understand the structure of the atomic nucleus. /news/2025-06-elementary-problem-ai-approach-tackles.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 25 Jun 2025 12:50:01 EDT news670074094 A new platform for engineering chiral electron pathways offers potential fresh insights into a quantum phenomenon discovered by chemists—and exemplifies how the second quantum revolution is fostering transdisciplinary collaborations that bridge physics, chemistry, and biology to tackle fundamental questions. /news/2025-06-quantum-spirals-programmable-platform-ways.html Condensed Matter Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Fri, 13 Jun 2025 14:00:03 EDT news668940541 Most people think of crocodilians as living fossils—stubbornly unchanged, prehistoric relics that have ruled the world's swampiest corners for millions of years. But their evolutionary history tells a different story, according to new research led by the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) and the University of Utah. /news/2025-04-ancestors-today-crocodilians-survived-mass.html Evolution Paleontology & Fossils Wed, 16 Apr 2025 00:00:04 EDT news663940514 With artificial photosynthesis, mankind could utilize solar energy to bind carbon dioxide and produce hydrogen. Chemists from Würzburg and Seoul have taken this one step further: They have synthesized a stack of dyes that comes very close to the photosynthetic apparatus of plants. It absorbs light energy, uses it to separate charge carriers and transfers them quickly and efficiently in the stack. /news/2025-03-artificial-photosynthesis-chemists-dye-stack.html Biochemistry Analytical Chemistry Fri, 14 Mar 2025 06:00:03 EDT news661066921 When spiders spin their webs, they use their hind legs to pull silk threads from their spinnerets. This pulling action doesn't just help the spider release the silk, it's also a crucial step in strengthening the silk fibers for a more durable web. /news/2025-03-spider-silk-stronger-aligning-protein.html Analytical Chemistry Materials Science Fri, 07 Mar 2025 14:00:07 EST news660500402 You may recognize graphite as the "lead" in a pencil, but besides helping you take notes or fill in countless bubbles on exam answer sheets, it is helping scientists grapple with the secrets of superconductivity. /news/2025-02-universal-principle-unconventional-superconductivity.html Superconductivity Mon, 24 Feb 2025 13:05:04 EST news659624701 In the Arctic, the old, multi-year ice is increasingly melting, dramatically reducing the frequency and size of pressure ridges. These ridges are created when ice floes press against each other and become stacked, and are a characteristic feature of Arctic sea ice, an obstacle for shipping, but also an essential component of the ecosystem. /news/2025-01-aerial-survey-analysis-reveals-major.html Earth Sciences Environment Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:52:06 EST news655379521 There have been many attempts to create monochromatic metallic materials, but few materials change luster color in response to external stimuli. In a recent breakthrough, researchers from Chiba University have prepared a diacetylene derivative-based metallic luster material that changes from silver to gold under UV irradiation. /news/2024-10-metallic-luster-material-silver-gold.html Analytical Chemistry Materials Science Wed, 30 Oct 2024 10:06:33 EDT news649501583 A pair of paleontologists at The Open University, working with a colleague from the National Museum of Scotland, have identified a new species of ancient cockroach excavated from a site in Gloucestershire, U.K. In their paper published in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, Emily Swaby, Angela Coe and Andrew Ross describe where the fossil was found, its condition, and where it fits in the cockroach family tree. /news/2024-10-ancient-species-cockroach-uk.html Paleontology & Fossils Tue, 29 Oct 2024 10:10:06 EDT news649415400 How can we engineer materials that are stronger and lighter? What about new materials for extreme conditions, such as in jet engines and spacecraft? The answer, says Fadi Abdeljawad, an associate professor of materials science and engineering in Lehigh University's P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, might be hidden in the infinitesimally tiny regions, or boundaries, where atoms in crystals come together. /news/2024-10-corners-atoms-path-materials-extreme.html Nanomaterials Wed, 16 Oct 2024 14:43:21 EDT news648308592 Inside the next generation of fusion vessels known as spherical tokamaks, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Â鶹ÒùÔºics Laboratory (PPPL) envisioned a hot region with flowing liquid metal that is reminiscent of a subterranean cave. Researchers say evaporating liquid metal could protect the inside of the tokamak from the intense heat of the plasma. It's an idea that dates back several decades and is tied to one of the Lab's strengths: working with liquid metals. /news/2024-08-quenching-intense-fusion-plasma-require.html Plasma Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 21 Aug 2024 10:52:04 EDT news643456321 Scientists have developed a way to detect tiny amounts of hard-to-detect explosives more than eight feet away, reducing the need to swipe clothing, luggage or other materials. /news/2024-08-explosives.html Analytical Chemistry Tue, 06 Aug 2024 13:09:21 EDT news642168551 Researchers have for the first time observed a time crystal on a microscale semiconductor chip oscillating at a rate of several billion times per second, unveiling exceptionally high non-linear dynamics in the GHz range. /news/2024-05-chip-ghz-crystals-semiconductor-photonic.html Condensed Matter Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Fri, 31 May 2024 11:34:40 EDT news636374076 In the realm of engineering and material science, detecting hidden structures or defects within materials is crucial. Traditional terahertz imaging systems, which rely on the unique property of terahertz waves to penetrate visibly opaque materials, have been developed to reveal the internal structures of various materials of interest. /news/2023-11-hidden-defects-materials-single-pixel-terahertz.html Condensed Matter Optics & Photonics Mon, 06 Nov 2023 09:58:03 EST news618487081 Light can excite electron and hole pairs inside semiconducting materials. If the attraction between a negatively charged electron and a positively charged hole (the antiparticle of electron in solid state physics) is strong, they stay bound together, forming states known as excitons. In these states, positively charged holes can be viewed as the vacancies left behind by the electrons they are paired with. /news/2023-09-excitons-moir-superlattices.html Condensed Matter Optics & Photonics Thu, 28 Sep 2023 09:55:02 EDT news615113693 Advances in computing power over the decades have come thanks in part to our ability to make smaller and smaller transistors, a building block of electronic devices, but we are nearing the limit of the silicon materials typically used. A new technique for creating 2D oxide materials may pave the way for future high-speed electronics, according to an international team of scientists. /news/2023-02-two-dimensional-oxides-door-high-speed-electronics.html Nanomaterials Wed, 15 Feb 2023 10:59:01 EST news595681137 Excitons are drawing attention as possible quantum bits (qubits) in tomorrow's quantum computers and are central to optoelectronics and energy-harvesting processes. However, these charge-neutral quasiparticles, which exist in semiconductors and other materials, are notoriously difficult to confine and manipulate. /news/2023-02-microscopy-images-ways-excitons-quantum.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Tue, 07 Feb 2023 11:42:03 EST news594992521 Nearly 100 million years ago, the Earth experienced an extreme environmental disruption that choked oxygen from the oceans and led to elevated marine extinction levels that affected the entire globe. /news/2023-01-malformed-seashells-ancient-sediment-clues.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 19 Jan 2023 11:00:04 EST news593333500 Marvel at the tiny nanoscale structures emerging from research labs at Duke University and Arizona State University, and it's easy to imagine you're browsing a catalog of the world's smallest pottery. /news/2022-12-software-tiny-rounded-dna-cool.html Bio & Medicine Nanomaterials Fri, 23 Dec 2022 14:00:03 EST news591014753 The world's best artists can take a handful of differently colored paints and create a museum-worthy canvas that looks like nothing else. They do so by drawing upon inspiration, knowledge of what's been done in the past and design rules they learned after years in the studio. /news/2022-12-chemists-unimaginable-crystalline-materials-discovery.html Materials Science Tue, 20 Dec 2022 16:47:03 EST news590777221 Inspired by living systems, researchers at Aalto University have developed a new material that changes its electrical behavior based on previous experience, effectively giving it a basic form of adaptive memory. Such adaptive materials could play a vital role in the next generation of medical and environmental sensors, as well as in soft robots or active surfaces. /news/2022-11-generation-material-history.html Materials Science Tue, 15 Nov 2022 10:37:58 EST news587731075 Achieving scalability in quantum processors, sensors, and networks requires novel devices that are easily manipulated between two quantum states. A team led by researchers from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has now developed a method, using a solid-state "twisted" crystalline layered material, which gives rise to tiny light-emitting points called color centers. These color centers can be switched on and off with the simple application of an external voltage. /news/2022-10-boron-nitride-qubits.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 06 Oct 2022 11:31:45 EDT news584274700 Shockwaves caused by asteroids colliding with Earth create materials with a range of complex carbon structures, which could be used for advancing future engineering applications, according to an international study led by UCL and Hungarian scientists. /news/2022-07-asteroid-impacts-diamond-materials-exceptionally.html Analytical Chemistry Materials Science Tue, 19 Jul 2022 02:36:44 EDT news577416997 Watch for the patterns created as the circles move across each other. Those patterns, created by two sets of lines offset from each other, are called moiré (pronounced mwar-AY) effects. As optical illusions, moiré patterns create neat simulations of movement. But at the atomic scale, when one sheet of atoms arranged in a lattice is slightly offset from another sheet, these moiré patterns can create some exciting and important physics with interesting and unusual electronic properties. /news/2022-06-highly-tunable-composite-materialswith.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Condensed Matter Tue, 14 Jun 2022 05:00:01 EDT news574400513 The nanoscopic equivalent of stacking a deck of cards—layering materials a mere few atoms thick atop one another—has emerged as a favorite pastime of material scientists and electrical engineers worldwide. /news/2022-04-team-rare-electricity-ultra-thin-material.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Wed, 27 Apr 2022 10:50:08 EDT news570275403 Harnessing the properties of materials so that technology can continue to move forward means getting to grips with increasingly more challenging systems. A team led by a researcher from the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo has turned its focus to chiral molecular and colloidal crystals, revealing the role of emergent elastic fields and their behavior. Their findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. /news/2022-03-elastic-fields-chiral-molecular-crystals.html Condensed Matter Thu, 31 Mar 2022 10:24:12 EDT news567941049 An unprecedented new telescope image of the Milky Way galaxy's turbulent center has revealed nearly 1,000 mysterious strands, inexplicably dangling in space. /news/2022-01-mysterious-strands-revealed-milky-center.html Astronomy Wed, 26 Jan 2022 10:17:32 EST news562414647 Using data gathered by the Large Area Telescope onboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and a stacking technique combining signals too weak to be observed on their own, researchers detected gamma rays from UFOs in several nearby galaxies for the first time, providing a basis for scientists to understand what happened in our own Milky Way galaxy. /news/2021-11-gamma-ray-discovery-advance-ultra-fast.html Astronomy Wed, 10 Nov 2021 11:27:26 EST news555766044 Researchers have developed a new method to measure force and atomic bonds at the nanoscale that reveals that the speed of sound depends on the structure it is traveling through. /news/2021-09-ultrasound-nanometer-scale-reveals-nature.html Nanomaterials Thu, 16 Sep 2021 09:47:12 EDT news551004429 It all started with a shaky washing machine. Pedro Reis, head of the Flexible Structures Laboratory at EPFL's School of Engineering, rolled up a piece of fabric and placed it under the machine to stop it from moving. After he saw how well the rolled-up fabric worked as a vibration damper, he got to thinking. He spoke with Samuel Poincloux, a postdoc at his lab, about his idea and they soon realized that the physics behind a piece of rolled-up material undergoing deformation is actually quite non-trivial. They set out to model the process, but given all the different variables involved, they decided to first simplify the problem. Instead of using rolled-up fabric, they started with a layered object possessing a similar geometry: a book. "For our experiments, we used flexible plastic sheets that we stacked up like the pages in a book, so that we could adjust and measure their collective properties," says Poincloux. /news/2021-06-friction-pages.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Mon, 14 Jun 2021 07:47:14 EDT news542875630