Physics
- 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
The Atoms Family
Dracula doesn’t want to suck your blood. He wants you to enter his online library and learn about the properties of light, waves, and particles. Here at “The Atoms Family” Web pages, created by the Miami Museum of Science, Dracula and four other silver-screen ghouls invite Web surfers into their laboratories to try out physics […]
- Materials Science
From Metal Bars to Candy Bars
Materials scientists have turned the tools of their trade on some of the most familiar substances in the world: food.
- 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.
- Materials Science
Scientists develop self-healing composites
Researchers have developed a composite material that has the ability to repair small cracks within itself, a characteristic that could be used to extend the reliability and service life of electronic and aerospace components.
- Materials Science
Droplets string themselves together
Under the right conditions, mixing two incompatible polymers can produce drops that organize themselves into strings.
- 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.
