Physics
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Materials Science
Nanotubes get as small as they can
Two research teams have created stable carbon nanotubes with the smallest diameter that scientists believe is physically possible, at just 0.4 nanometer across.
- Materials Science
Nanotubes: Knot just for miniature work
A new technique can spin individual nanotubes into durable ribbons and threads visible to the naked eye.
- Materials Science
A hard new material with a soft touch
Adding exotic substances called quasicrystals to polymers creates nonabrasive hard materials, which could soon serve as coatings in machine parts.
- Materials Science
New lithium battery design charges up
Researchers have developed a new, safer type of electrode for lithium batteries.
- Physics
When all is a spin, calm is dragged in
When laboratory vortices are mixed to create the equivalent of a tornado in a hurricane, the "hurricane" may gobble up spots of calm from the outside world.
- Physics
Hot little levers write beaucoup bits
Arrays of microscopic tips may offer a way to pack digital data more tightly and transfer it more quickly than is possible with magnetic hard disks.
- Physics
Particle hunt off, collider comes down
Despite tantalizing, last-minute hints of a long-sought, mass-giving particle called the Higgs boson, dismantling of the Large Electron-Positron collider has begun.
- Materials Science
Making Stuff Last
Chemistry and materials science step up to preserve history, old and new.
- Materials Science
Anyone want to knit a microscopic sweater?
Microscopic polymer tubes can tangle themselves into a new and possibly useful structure—tiny "yarn balls" that flatten out and partly unravel in an electric field.
- Physics
An electron ruler gauges crystal flaws
Electrons ricocheting through a crystal now make it possible for scientists to discern shifts in crystal lattices as small as a hundredth of an atom's width.
- Materials Science
One-Upping Nature’s Materials
Striving for designer substances that build themselves from individual molecules.
- Materials Science
To make bronze, tin flakes do a wild dance
Upsetting some prevailing ideas about how alloys form, rafts of tin atoms jitterbug madly around on a pure copper surface and leave spots of bronze in their wakes.
