All Stories by Peter Weiss
- Physics
New probe reveals unfamiliar inner proton
Researchers taking one of the closest looks yet into the intact proton have found an unexpectedly complex interior electromagnetic environment.
- Tech
Electromagnetism acts oddly in device
Without breaking any physical laws, a novel, fiberglass-copper structure affects microwaves so strangely that a beam of radiation passing through it bends at an angle opposite from what it get bent at an angle opposite from what it would have exiting any other known material.
- Tech
Stuff gets stiffed by unstiff inserts
In an odd twist, material that is so extremely yielding that it is said to have negative stiffness will make already stiff materials even stiffer when it's blended into them.
- Tech
Novel fuel cell gets hot, but not by a lot
A new type of fuel cell that works above the boiling point of water—but not too much above it—may lead to improved nonpolluting power sources suitable for cars and portable electronic gadgets.
- Humans
Biomedicine, defense to sidestep budget ax
President Bush's first budget request would boost funding for biomedical and military research but trim federal outlays for other areas of science and technology.
- Tech
Oceans of Electricity
The world's first commercial wave-power plant began pumping current into a Scottish island's electric grid last winter, just ahead of a host of competing schemes for converting ocean-wave motion into electricity.
- Physics
Surface reaction recorded in real time
Ultrafast laser pulses may have for the first time revealed the incredibly rapid, step-by-step progress of a complete chemical reaction on a surface, at the actual speed at which it took place.
- Physics
Cold sliver may sense electron quiver
By detecting vibrations of less than an atom's width of a tiny cantilever, physicists have made the most sensitive measurement of force ever by mechanical means.
- Physics
Moon may radio cosmic rays’ biggest hits
Efforts to use the moon to detect the highest-energy cosmic rays get a boost from an experiment showing that gamma rays zipping through a giant sandbox cause the kind of microwave bursts moon-watchers are hoping to see.
- Physics
Frigid ‘dynamite’ assembles into superatom
Although it's now the fifth element to be made into the strange state of ultracold matter known as Bose-Einstein condensate, helium may prove to be the most revealing so far because of unusually high energies within the newly condensed atoms.
- 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.
