Physics
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Physics
Goo’s melting could keep battery cool
Using the sometimes dangerous heat of lithium batteries to melt wax or similar materials may keep the potent cells cool enough for safe use in electric vehicles while also boosting the batteries' performance.
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- Physics
One-molecule chemistry gets big reaction
Carrying out a widely used chemical reaction on one molecule at a time, researchers demonstrate unprecedented control of molecular behavior and, possibly, the ability to make novel nanotechnology devices and compounds that can't be created with ordinary chemistry.
- Physics
Electron breakup? Physics shake-up
A controversial theoretical proposal that challenges more than a century of theory and experiments suggests that loose electrons in liquid helium may break into pieces, dubbed electrinos.
- Physics
Most-Wanted Particle Appears, Perhaps
Hints of the Higgs boson—the crucial and last undetected fundamental particle predicted by the central theory of particle physics—have cropped up at a particle collider in Switzerland just as the machine is slated to be dismantled to make room for a more powerful collider.
- Physics
Electrons get a crack at the nucleus
As long suspected but never before shown, electrons orbiting an atom can directly excite the atom's nucleus.
- Physics
Hydrogen hoops give superfluid clues
Tiny rings of hydrogen molecules show signs of possible superfluid behavior, suggesting that helium might not be the only superfluid after all.
- Materials Science
Titanium makes move toward mainstream
Inventors of a new process for producing titanium claim that their method can reduce the metal's cost to one-third its current price.
- Physics
Through the Looking Glass
A proposed universe of unseen material, where every ordinary particle has a shadowy counterpart, could explain several conundrums in cosmology.
- Materials Science
Cathedral has weathered London’s acid rain
A decrease in acid rain seems to be responsible for newly reported reduced deterioration rates of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
- Physics
Seeking the Mother of All Matter
World's mightiest particle collider may transform less-than-nothing into a primordial something.
- Materials Science
Apollo attire needs care
Advanced spacesuits protected astronauts far from Earth just 30 years ago, but the materials have already deteriorated.
