All Stories by Peter Weiss
- Physics
Some swell materials give up their secret
The discovery of a previously overlooked crystal structure in the best so-called piezoelectric materials may explain their remarkable amount of swelling when zapped by an electric field.
- Physics
When warming up causes cooling down
Under the right circumstances, heating a tiny cluster of sodium atoms makes its temperature fall.
- Physics
Physicists get B in antimatter studies
New observations that subatomic particles called B mesons decay differently from their antimatter versions may help explain why the universe is made almost entirely of matter, not antimatter.
- Physics
Run-of-the-mill compound becomes superstar
The discovery that simple, common magnesium diboride can conduct electric current without resistance and does so at a surprisingly high temperature has sent physicists racing to understand its properties and to try to improve upon them.
- Physics
Lasers nudge into nuclear medicine
Using a tabletop laser, researchers produced a medically useful isotope usually made in warehouse-size particle accelerators called cyclotrons.
- Physics
Muffled shots tell a lot about snow
A snowfield muffles gunshots in a way that can now be used to reveal important traits of the snow.
- Physics
Seeming sedate, some solid surfaces seethe
Although they're as orderly as bathroom-floor tiles, surface atoms of copper--and perhaps other solids--actually roam randomly and widely within their grid.
- Physics
Muon orbits may defy main physics theory
A tiny discrepancy from theory in a newly remeasured magnetic trait of a subatomic particle, the muon, may represent a first crack in the 30-year-old prevailing standard model of particle physics.
- Tech
Hop . . . Hop . . . Hopbots!
Two prototype jumping robots that hop, crash-and-land, and then hop again are demonstrating a novel mobility concept that may finally enable small, cheap robots to roam widely over rough terrain.
- Physics
Force from empty space drives a machine
A novel micromachine uses quantum fluctuations of empty space to help drive its motion.
- Physics
Voltage flip turns magnetism on, off
Researchers in Japan have made a material whose inherent magnetism can be turned off and on electrically, as long as the material, a novel semiconductor, stays ultracold.
- Physics
Collider is cookin’, but is it soup?
By making the densest, hottest matter ever in a lab, smashups between fast-moving nuclei in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider are coming closer than ever to reproducing the superhot, primordial fluid that presumably filled the universe immediately after the Big Bang.
