/ 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. Summer is the time for sunshine, but Americans have been getting a surplus of heat this summer, with millions of people across the Southeast recently facing a blistering heat wave with heat indexes, or feels-like temperatures, reaching into triple digits. /news/2025-08-science-homeowners-extreme-weather.html Environment Tue, 26 Aug 2025 09:36:57 EDT news675419809 Researchers in McGill's Department of Mechanical Engineering have discovered a safe and low-cost method of engineering living materials such as tissues, organs and blood clots. By simply vibrating these materials as they form, scientists can dramatically influence how strong or weak they become. /news/2025-08-safe-scalable-vibration-technique-lab.html Cell & Microbiology Biotechnology Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:50:06 EDT news675355266 Liquids can provide some especially tricky challenges for space travelers, but new research from the University of Mississippi could help engineer smarter, more efficient fluid control in zero- and low-gravity environments. /news/2025-08-tiny-big-impact-fluid-space.html Soft Matter Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:40:01 EDT news675351028 Worldwide, an estimated 440 million people were exposed to a wildfire encroaching on their home at some point between 2002 and 2021, new research shows. That's roughly equivalent to the entire population of the European Union, and the number has been steadily rising—up 40% over those two decades. /news/2025-08-wildfire-disasters-news-globally.html Earth Sciences Environment Sun, 24 Aug 2025 15:40:01 EDT news675077646 Hawaii's Kilauea volcano resumed erupting Friday by shooting an arc of lava 100 feet (30 meters) into the air and across a section of its summit crater floor. /news/2025-08-kilauea-eruption-hawaii-volcano-lava.html Environment Sat, 23 Aug 2025 05:20:01 EDT news675143636 A line of engineering research seeks to develop computers that can tackle a class of challenges called combinatorial optimization problems. These are common in real-world applications such as arranging telecommunications, scheduling, and travel routing to maximize efficiency. /news/2025-08-physics-architecture-complex-optimization-problems.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Sat, 23 Aug 2025 02:50:01 EDT news675135731 There has long been a mystery when calculating how an incoming light wave scatters off an object and becomes a modified, outgoing light wave. In particular, the time delay of the transition from one to the other comes out to be a complex number, a regular real number but with a nonzero imaginary part. /news/2025-08-previously-mysterious-imaginary-component.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Optics & Photonics Fri, 22 Aug 2025 09:41:21 EDT news675074471 The seatbelt sign pings on, trays rattle, drinks slosh in their glasses. For many fliers, air turbulence can be an unnerving experience—and in a world warming under the effects of climate change, it is only set to worsen, according to a growing body of scientific evidence. /news/2025-08-bumpy-skies-climate-air-turbulence.html Environment Fri, 22 Aug 2025 02:33:56 EDT news675048811 Scientists have long speculated that polaritons—hybrids of light and matter—could be harnessed to control photochemistry. Now, researchers at the City University of New York (CUNY) have shown that these fleeting states can indeed drive a fundamental type of molecular reaction. /news/2025-08-scientists-harness-polaritons-molecular.html Nanophysics Thu, 21 Aug 2025 15:22:43 EDT news675008559 Holography—the science of recording and reconstructing light fields—has long been central to imaging, data storage, and encryption. Traditional holographic systems, however, rely on bulky optical setups and interference experiments, making them impractical for compact or integrated devices. Computational methods such as the Gerchberg–Saxton (GS) algorithm have simplified hologram design by eliminating the need for physical interference patterns, but these approaches typically produce scalar holograms with uniform polarization, limiting the amount of information that can be encoded. /news/2025-08-ultrathin-metasurface-enables-high-efficiency.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:53:07 EDT news674999577 For years, engineers have sought better ways to build tiny, efficient lasers that can be integrated directly onto silicon chips, a key step toward faster, more capable optical communications and computing. /news/2025-08-simple-additive-method-perovskite-laser.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:22:03 EDT news674925721 Optical frequency combs are specially designed lasers that act like rulers to accurately and rapidly measure specific frequencies of light. They can be used to detect and identify chemicals and pollutants with extremely high precision. /news/2025-08-ultrabroadband-laser-enable-rapid-identification.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 20 Aug 2025 14:17:04 EDT news674918221 While nothing says "summer" quite like the taste of a perfectly ripe tomato, excessive heat during the growing season can prevent tomato plants from bearing fruit. /news/2025-08-tomatoes.html Agriculture Wed, 20 Aug 2025 11:00:21 EDT news674906417 Solitonic waves—waves that keep their shape and direction of motion for a long time—have intrigued physicists for almost two centuries. In real-world circumstances, these waves eventually die out due to energy loss. A team of UvA physicists have now discovered how a particular type of interaction can be used to create very stable solitons, even in circumstances where energy is not conserved. /news/2025-08-physicists-stable-solitons-energy.html Condensed Matter Tue, 19 Aug 2025 10:33:04 EDT news674818381 Lava shoots high into the sky. Molten rock erupts from two vents simultaneously. The nighttime sky glows red and orange, reflecting the lava oozing across a summit crater. /news/2025-08-hawaii-kilauea-volcano-verge-erupting.html Environment Tue, 19 Aug 2025 02:10:04 EDT news674787935 Simulations still can't predict exactly when an earthquake will happen, but with the incredible processing power of modern exascale supercomputers, they can now predict how they will happen and how much damage they will likely cause. /news/2025-08-exascale-simulations-underpin-quake-resistant.html Earth Sciences Tue, 19 Aug 2025 01:53:19 EDT news674787192 Hurricane Erin's massive footprint battered Caribbean islands with heavy gusts and downpours Monday, as it threatened rip currents and flooding along the US East Coast later this week even without a predicted landfall. /news/2025-08-hurricane-erin-drenches-caribbean-islands.html Environment Mon, 18 Aug 2025 14:23:27 EDT news674745802 A team of international researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Johns Hopkins University and Duke University has discovered that a century-old theory describing turbulence in fluids also applies to a very bubbly problem: how rising bubbles stir the water around them. /news/2025-08-elegant-theory-chaos.html Soft Matter Mon, 18 Aug 2025 09:47:13 EDT news674729219 Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a method to more precisely heat up gold nanoparticles to target and destroy cancerous tumors. Using imaging methods that combine light and sound to peer deeper into tissue, the team was better able to track and heat up nanoparticles to destroy a bladder cancer tumor in an animal model. The research is published in the journal Science Advances. /news/2025-08-based-thermometer-gold-nanoparticles-destroy.html Bio & Medicine Mon, 18 Aug 2025 09:09:19 EDT news674726954 A new initiative recently launched in Chicago is striving to predict urban flooding. Verizon, in conjunction with Chicago's Center for Neighborhood Technology and a Michigan-based startup, is equipping the city with technology that will give officials and residents alike the ability to track urban flooding in real time. /news/2025-08-sensors-chicago.html Environment Mon, 18 Aug 2025 07:39:34 EDT news674721567 In San Francisco Bay, salt ponds created more than a century ago are reverting to marshland. Along the New York and New Jersey coasts, beaches ravaged by Superstorm Sandy underwent extensive restoration. In Alabama, a rebuilt spit of land is shielding a historic town and providing wildlife habitat. /news/2025-08-coastal-communities-marshes-dunes-reefs.html Environment Sun, 17 Aug 2025 11:18:51 EDT news674648325 Researchers at Rice University and collaborating institutions have discovered direct evidence of active flat electronic bands in a kagome superconductor. This breakthrough could pave the way for new methods to design quantum materials—including superconductors, topological insulators and spin-based electronics—that could power future electronics and computing technologies. /news/2025-08-scientists-quantum-behavior-unusual-superconducting.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Sat, 16 Aug 2025 03:16:23 EDT news674532955 Researchers at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge have demonstrated a new way to control radiation in the terahertz range—an often-overlooked part of the electromagnetic spectrum—with unprecedented dynamic range and speed. The findings could open the door to advanced technologies in communications, imaging, and sensing and mark major progress in the development of practical devices that operate in the terahertz range. /news/2025-08-graphene-capacitors-rapid-high-depth.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Fri, 15 Aug 2025 03:00:01 EDT news674445047 EIRSAT-1, Ireland's first satellite, has successfully tested an advanced onboard control system that allows it to orient itself accurately in space. The breakthrough was achieved using a payload called Wave-Based Control (WBC), a software platform designed by a team at UCD School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering to test new satellite maneuvering techniques while in orbit. /news/2025-08-eirsat-payload-successfully-advanced-satellite.html Space Exploration Planetary Sciences Thu, 14 Aug 2025 15:38:27 EDT news674404703 An international team of scientists led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed a new type of ultracompact laser that is more energy efficient and consumes less power. /news/2025-08-energy-efficient-ultracompact-laser-loss.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:34:04 EDT news674390042 If you've been to a routine eye exam at the optometrist's office, chances are you've had to place your chin and forehead up close to a bioimaging device. /news/2025-08-bioimaging-device-nonmechanical-eye-heart.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 13 Aug 2025 16:37:04 EDT news674321821 While conventional computers store information in the form of bits, fundamental pieces of logic that take a value of either 0 or 1, quantum computers are based on qubits. These can have a state that is simultaneously both 0 and 1. This odd property, a quirk of quantum physics known as superposition, lies at the heart of quantum computing's promise to ultimately solve problems that are intractable for classical computers. /news/2025-08-quantum-longer.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:59:56 EDT news674308789 Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have helped develop an advanced, real-time tsunami forecasting system—powered by El Capitan, the world's fastest supercomputer—that could dramatically improve early warning capabilities for coastal communities near earthquake zones. /news/2025-08-scientists-explore-real-tsunami-world.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:28:04 EDT news674224081 One of the defining features of an arctic environment is permafrost, which covers almost 10% of Earth's surface and remains entirely frozen year round. With temperatures reaching more extreme levels more frequently, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded a two-year, $957,013 grant to Penn State Professor Ming Xiao, to investigate the effect on permafrost and how its melting could expose contaminants to the environment. /news/2025-08-qa-permanent-permafrost-temperatures.html Environment Tue, 12 Aug 2025 09:51:09 EDT news674211064 Just as overlapping ripples on a pond can amplify or cancel each other out, waves of many kinds—including light, sound and atomic vibrations—can interfere with one another. At the quantum level, this kind of interference powers high-precision sensors and could be harnessed for quantum computing. /news/2025-08-powerful-quantum-paves-phonon-based.html Condensed Matter Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Mon, 11 Aug 2025 14:39:04 EDT news674141941