All Stories by Peter Weiss
- Tech
Gel Bots? Vibrated goo mimics slithery motions
The ability of soft, jellylike hydrogels to move as do snails, snakes, and inchworms may point the way to a new class of squishy robots that promise to be simple, quiet, and versatile.
- Tech
Gel Bots? Vibrated goo mimics slithery motions
The ability of soft, jellylike hydrogels to move as do snails, snakes, and inchworms may point the way to a new class of squishy robots that promise to be simple, quiet, and versatile.
- Tech
Glow with the flow
Potentially usable electricity flows when water is forced through millions of ceramic tubes thinner than a human hair.
- Tech
Glow with the flow
Potentially usable electricity flows when water is forced through millions of ceramic tubes thinner than a human hair.
- Physics
Dune leapfrogging is deciphered
Some wind-propelled sand dunes can pass right through each other if their relative sizes are right, new computer simulations indicate—although the sand grains of one dune don't actually penetrate through the other dune.
- Physics
Dune leapfrogging is deciphered
Some wind-propelled sand dunes can pass right through each other if their relative sizes are right, new computer simulations indicate—although the sand grains of one dune don't actually penetrate through the other dune.
- Physics
Hints emerge of a four-quark particle
Previously observed only in twos, threes, and perhaps in fives, quarks and antiquarks in a newfound particle may have glommed together to form a never-before-seen foursome.
- Physics
Doppler Toppler: Experiment upends normal frequency shift
The expected drop in frequency of a signal from a receding source—the Doppler effect—becomes a frequency increase when a high-current electric pulse creates extraordinary electromagnetic conditions in a web of electrical components.
- Tech
Wings of Change
Inspired by the Wright brothers, who steered their first flyer by twisting its pliant wings, engineers are developing versatile and flexible flying machines expected to undergo radical shape changes in flight.
- Tech
Electronic Thread: Fiber transistor may lead to woven circuits
By coating flexible metal fibers with semiconductors, researchers have developed individual threads that act as transistors and that should be linkable into circuits by means of wires included among a fabric's threads.
- Physics
Quantum Pileup: Ultracold molecules meld into oneness
Scientists have for the first time transformed molecules into an exotic state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
- Physics
Humpty-Dumpty Effect: Acoustically, people resemble large eggs
The first measurements of how people intrinsically scatter sound waves indicate that, acoustically, a human body resembles a hard ellipsoid of the same height and girth as the person.
