Science News

In particle physics, a jet is a shower of collimated particles generated by a highly energetic quark or gluon. In a lead-lead collision, jets must traverse through quark gluon plasma, altering their... energy, track and consistency.

The high resolution and wealth of data provided by an experiment at Diamond can lead to unexpected discoveries. The piezoelectric properties of the ceramic perovskite PMN-PT... (0.68Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-0.32PbTiO3) are widely used in commercial actuators, where the strain that is generated varies continuously with applied voltage. However, if the applied voltage is cycled appropriately then there are discontinuous changes of strain. These discontinuous changes can be used to drive magnetic switching in a thin overlying ferromagnet, permitting magnetic information to be written electrically. An international team of researchers used beamline I06 to investigate a ferromagnetic film of nickel when it served as a sensitive strain gauge for single-crystal PMN-PT. Their initial interpretation of the...

In early 2018, Cape Town, South Africa came dangerously close to being the world's first major city to run out of water. People lined up for blocks to collect spring water. Stores sold out of... receptacles like buckets and bowls. Bottled water was rationed in tourist-heavy parts of the city. April 12 was designated "Day […]

Forty years ago, in 1979, experiments at the DESY laboratory in Germany provided the first direct proof of the existence of gluons--the carriers of the strong force that "glue" quarks into protons,... neutrons and other particles known collectively as hadrons. This discovery was a milestone in the history of particle physics, as it helped establish the theory of the strong force, known as quantum chromodynamics.

When studying biological cells using optical tweezers, one main issue is the damage caused to the cell by the tool. Giovanni Volpe, University of Gothenburg, has discovered a new type of force that... will greatly reduce the amount of light used by optical tweezers--and improve the study of all kinds of cells and particles.

NASA has captured its closest and most detailed image yet of Bennu, a 78 billion-kilogram asteroid which approaches close to Earth every six years

In quantum electrodynamics, the choice of gauge (i.e. specific mathematical formalism used to regulate degrees of freedom) can greatly influence the form of light-matter interactions. Interestingly,... however, the "gauge invariance" principle implies that all physical results should be independent from a researcher's choice of gauge. The quantum Rabi model, which is often used to describe light-matter interactions in cavity-QED, has been found to violate this principle in the presence of ultrastrong light-matter coupling, and past studies have attributed this failure to the finite-level truncation of the matter system.

Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) have created the first silicon chip that can reliably constrain light to its four corners. The effect, which arises from interfering optical pathways,... isn't altered by small defects during fabrication and could eventually enable the creation of robust sources of quantum light.

While intense magnetic fields are naturally generated by neutron stars, researchers have been striving to achieve similar results for many years. UC San Diego mechanical and aerospace engineering... graduate student Tao Wang recently demonstrated how an extremely strong magnetic field, similar to that on the surface of a neutron star, can be not only generated but also detected using an X-ray laser inside a solid material.

Transplant organs are still being sourced from executed prisoners in China, according to an inquiry set up by a campaign group to investigate the issue

Such a mission would have to keep two spacecraft, separated by thousands of miles, aligned within 3 feet of each other.

Facebook is launching a cryptocurrency called Libra. It says people will be able to use the currency to pay for goods from within WhatsApp

During the last ice age, bone-crushing hyenas stalked the snowy Canadian Arctic, likely satisfying their meat cravings by hunting herds of caribou and horses, while also scavenging mammoth carcasses... on the tundra, a new study finds.

Global population growth will nearly grind to a stop by the end of the century.

This colonial tavern (and maybe brothel) burned down years before the rest of Brunswick Town was razed by British soldiers in 1766.

(Kazan Federal University) Mr. Murzakhanov's master thesis is dedicated to magnetic resonance-assisted observations of hydroxyapatite and tricalcium phosphate. They are both used in bone implant... technology, but, as with any artificial materials, there is a problem of biocompatibility.

(University of Würzburg) When two proteins work together, this worsens the prognosis for lung cancer patients: their chances of survival are particularly poor in this case.

(University of Gothenburg) When studying biological cells using optical tweezers, one main issue is the damage caused to the cell by the tool. Giovanni Volpe, University of Gothenburg, has discovered... a new type of force that will greatly reduce the amount of light used by optical tweezers -- and improve the study of all kinds of cells and particles.

(National Research Council of Science & Technology) On May 22, Dr. Minah Lee from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) was announced as the 2018/2019 recipient of the Wiley Young... Researcher Award.

(Murdoch Childrens Research Institute) A drug that helps regulate bone development has boosted growth rates in children with achondroplasia -- the most common type of dwarfism -- in a trial by... Melbourne's Murdoch Children's Research Institute. Phase 2 trial results in children aged 5 to 14 years are published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The project is now in Phase 3 to test the drug, vosoritide, in a larger group of patients aged 5 to 18 years.

(University of Jyväskylä - Jyväskylän yliopisto) Because of climate change-induced increases in air temperature and annual precipitation, boreal lakes are warming and the amount of external... loading of organic matter to the lakes may increase. The study results indicated that these factors may also increase the lake carbon dioxide concentrations and enhance the release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

(BASF SE) Greentown Labs, the largest cleantech startup incubator in North America, and BASF, one of the world's leading chemical companies, are accepting applications for its Circularity Challenge, a... six-month accelerator program. Greentown Labs and BASF are seeking ideas from startups with a proof of concept solution to disrupt the plastics, energy storage and recycling value chains to enable a circular economy. This program is supported by Stanley Black & Decker, a leading global diversified industrial.

(Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) DNA, the hereditary material, may have appeared on Earth earlier than has been assumed hitherto. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich chemists led... by Oliver Trapp show that a simple reaction pathway could have given rise to DNA subunits on the early Earth.

(Osaka University) Osaka University researchers studied the photocatalytic activity of oxyhalide materials and were able to demonstrate a relationship between parameters measured by time-resolved... microwave conductivity (TRMC) and oxygen generation. Using the relationship, they optimized the processing temperature for the synthesis of the photocatalyst PbBiO2Cl, resulting in a 3-fold improvement in the apparent quantum efficiency compared with previous reports. It is hoped that the findings will allow for high throughput screening and efficient photocatalyst development.

(University of Copenhagen) A new study on the behavior of water in cancer cells shows how methods usually limited to physics can be of great use in cancer research. The researchers, Murillo Longo... Martins and Heloisa N. Bordallo at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, have shown how a combination of neutron scattering and thermal analysis can be used to map the properties of water in breast cancer cells.