All Stories by Peter Weiss
- Physics
Not even bismuth-209 lasts forever
Touted in textbooks as the heaviest stable, naturally occurring isotope, bismuth-209 actually does decay but with an astonishingly long half-life of 19 billion billion years.
- Tech
Tipping tiny scales
A prototype detector based on a tiny silicon cantilever that operates in air has achieved a 1,000-fold sensitivity boost when measuring tiny quantities of chemical agents.
- Computing
Minding Your Business
By means of novel sensors and mathematical models, scientists are teaching the basics of human social interactions to computers, which should ease the ever-expanding collaboration between people and machines.
- Materials Science
Blunt Answer: Cracking the puzzle of elastic solids’ toughness
Rubbery materials prove tougher than theory predicts because cracks trying to penetrate those stretchy materials grow blunt at their tips.
- Materials Science
Between the Sheets: In reactors and nanotubes, errant atoms get a grip
A new computer simulation predicts that neutron irradiation of graphite displaces atoms and bonds in unexpected ways.
- Physics
Fusion device crosses threshold
By sparking thermonuclear reactions, a machine called Z has joined the big leagues among potential technologies for producing power from controlled nuclear fusion.
- Physics
Light rambles through room-temperature ruby
Researchers have dramatically slowed light within a solid at room temperature.
- Physics
Rare Events: Exotic processes probe the heart of matter
Physicists have for the first time unambiguously detected and measured the rates of certain reactions among protons, neutrons, and simple atomic nuclei.
- Materials Science
A Hard Little Lesson: Squeezed nanospheres grow superstrong
A substance not known for its hardness—silicon—becomes one of the hardest of materials when formed into ultrasmall spheres.
- Computing
Pictures Only a Computer Could Love
New, unconventional lenses shape scenes into pictures for computers, not people, so that computer-equipped microscopes, cameras, and other optical devices can see more with less.
- Physics
Muon Manna? Particle shower may spotlight loose nukes
Radiation from space may help border guards spot loose nukes stowed in shipping containers.
- Physics
Squirming through space-time
In the exotic realm of curved space, the topography of space itself might provide a propulsion assist—albeit a tiny one.
