Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Updating high-resolution MRI

How can you make a high-frequency MRI machine more precise? By taking an electrical engineering approach to creating a better, uniform magnetic field.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OjdQuJ

Math describes how bubbles pop

Understanding the dynamics of bursting bubbles can provide critical insights for a range of fields from oceanography to atmospheric science, but the mechanisms that drive the final pop are complex and difficult to describe.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2EUyp13

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Hawking's signed thesis, wheelchair auctioned in London

A copy of Stephen Hawking's doctorate thesis signed in a shaky hand was unveiled Tuesday as the highlight of a new auction of the British physicist's personal items in London.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2zfO4Sv

Electronic noise due to temperature difference in atomic-scale junctions

Noise is a fundamental feature of any electrical measurement that calculates random and correlated signal fluctuations. Although noise is typically undesirable, noise can be used to probe quantum effects and thermodynamic quantities. Writing in Nature, Shein Lumbroso and co-workers now report a new type of electronic noise discovered to be distinct from all other previous observations. Understanding such noise can be essential to design efficient nanoscale electronics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CS3e3T

Electronic activity previously invisible to electron microscopes revealed

The chips that drive everyday electronic gadgets such as personal computers and smartphones are made in semiconductor fabrication plants. These plants employ powerful transmission electron microscopes. While they can see physical structures smaller than a billionth of a meter, these microscopes have no way of seeing the electronic activity that makes the devices function.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2PwGs8d

Scientists refine the search for dark matter

Researchers from Lund University in Sweden, among others, have developed a more effective technique in the search for clues about dark matter in the universe. They can now analyse much larger amounts of the data generated at CERN.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2DcHkcC

Monday, October 29, 2018

Fast-flowing electrons may mimic astrophysical dynamos

A powerful engine roils deep beneath our feet, converting energy in the Earth's core into magnetic fields that shield us from the solar wind. Similar engines drive the magnetic activity of the sun, other stars and even other planets—all of which create magnetic fields that reinforce themselves and feed back into the engines to keep them running.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Q36oWd

A new material for energy-efficient data storage reaches computer operating temperature

Multiferroics are considered miraculous materials for future data storage – as long as their special properties can be preserved at computer operating temperatures. This task has now been accomplished by researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, with colleagues from Institut Laue-Langevin ILL in Grenoble. With this, they have taken these materials one step closer to practical applications. The use of multiferroics holds promise for more energy-efficient computers because an electric field would suffice for magnetic data storage. To produce this, much less power and cooling are required than with conventional magnetic storage. Multiferroics combine magnetic and electrical properties to form a material that is extremely rare. Most such materials only exhibit these two properties at temperatures well below the freezing point. In order to keep the magnetic properties stable even at one hundred degrees, the researchers have employed a trick. They used atoms smaller than those employed in previous investigations, making the material more compact. This was enough to make its structure resistant to heat and preserve its crucial magnetic properties. The researchers published their results today in the journal Science Advances.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2qgNQpW

Shedding light on Weyl fermions

Researchers from the Theory Department of the MPSD in Hamburg and North Carolina State University in the US have demonstrated that the long-sought magnetic Weyl semi-metallic state can be induced by ultrafast laser pulses in a three-dimensional class of magnetic materials dubbed pyrochlore iridates. Their results, which have been published in Nature Communications, could enable high-speed magneto-optical topological switching devices for next-generation electronics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2qhwzgE

Rationalizing phonon dispersion: an efficient and precise prediction of lattice thermal conductivity

Lattice thermal conductivity strongly affects the applications of materials related to thermal functionality, such as thermal management, thermal barrier coatings and thermoelectrics. In order to understand lattice thermal conductivity more quantitatively and in a time- and cost-effective way, many researchers have devoted their efforts and developed a few physical models using approximated phonon dispersions over the past century.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2yFxcFn

Thursday, October 25, 2018

The K-core as a predictor of structural collapse in mutualistic ecosystems

A network metric called the K-core could predict structural collapse in mutualistic ecosystems, according to research by physicists at The City College of New York. The K-core appears able to forecast which species is likely to face extinction first, by global shocks such as climate change, and when an ecosystem could collapse due to external forces.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2O7cuD9

Research reveals secret shared by comets and sand crabs

Researchers at Nagoya University report a mechanical connection between sand crab burrow widths and widths of cometary pits using a simple granular experiment.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2ESAc6S

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Scientists develop computational model to predict human behavior

Army researchers have developed for the first time an analytic model to show how groups of people influence individual behavior.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OJvP2c

A first 'snapshot' of the complete spectrum of neutrinos emitted by the sun

About 99 percent of the Sun's energy emitted as neutrinos is produced through nuclear reaction sequences initiated by proton-proton (pp) fusion in which hydrogen is converted into helium, say scientists including physicist Andrea Pocar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Today they report new results from Borexino, one of the most sensitive neutrino detectors on the planet, located deep beneath Italy's Apennine Mountains.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Reuw8x

STAR Detector on the move

How long does it take to roll a twelve-hundred-ton detector one hundred feet? In late August, it took 10 hours for the STAR detector to roll from its regular spot in the interaction region of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to the assembly building to undergo maintenance. It's all part of a program to keep this giant multi-purpose particle detector (kind of like a giant 3-D digital camera) in tip-top condition for capturing subatomic smashups at RHIC, a DOE Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2EICqp1

Halfway to high luminosity

The High-Luminosity LHC has reached its halfway point. The second-generation LHC project was launched eight years ago and is scheduled to start up in 2026, eight years from now. From 15 to 18 October, the institutes contributing to this future accelerator came together at CERN to assess the progress of the work as the project moves from prototyping to the series production phase for much of the equipment.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CAqeEg

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Researchers validate 80-year-old ferroelectric theory

Researchers have successfully demonstrated that hypothetical particles that were proposed by Franz Preisach in 1935 actually exist. In an article published in Nature Communications, scientists from the universities in Linköping and Eindhoven show why ferroelectric materials act as they do.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CXd1GJ

Monday, October 22, 2018

A bridge to the quantum world

Monika Aidelsburger uses a special type of optical lattice to simulate quantum many-body phenomena that are otherwise inaccessible to experimental exploration. She has now been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to pursue this work.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2R8IaKg

Understanding the building blocks for an electronic brain

Computer bits are binary, with a value of zero or one. By contrast, neurons in the brain can have many internal states, depending on the input that they receive. This allows the brain to process information in a more energy-efficient manner than a computer. University of Groningen (UG) physicists are working on memristors made from niobium-doped strontium titanate, which mimic the function of neurons. Their results were published in the Journal of Applied Physics on 21 October.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CXUuK3

Stephen Hawking's wheelchair, thesis for sale

Stephen Hawking was a cosmic visionary, a figure of inspiration and a global celebrity.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NVYA6s

Friday, October 19, 2018

Merging mathematical and physical models toward building a more perfect flying vehicle

When designing flying vehicles, there are many aspects of which we can be certain but there are also many uncertainties. Most are random, and others are just not well understood. University of Illinois Professor Harry Hilton brought together several mathematical and physical theories to help look at problems in more unified ways and solve physical engineering problems.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2P5wlXZ

Researchers study interactions in molecules using AI

Researchers from the University of Luxembourg, Technische Universität Berlin, and the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society have combined machine learning and quantum mechanics to predict the dynamics and atomic interactions in molecules. The new approach allows for a degree of precision and efficiency that has never been achieved before.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2ypY3Fb

Thursday, October 18, 2018

Scientists discover first high-temperature single-molecule magnet

A team of scientists led by Professor Richard Layfield at the University of Sussex has published breakthrough research in molecule-based magnetic information storage materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2q04D0E

The big problem of small data: A new approach

Big Data is all the rage today, but Small Data matters too! Drawing reliable conclusions from small datasets, like those from clinical trials for rare diseases or in studies of endangered species, remains one of the trickiest obstacles in statistics. Now, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) researchers have developed a new way to analyze small data, one inspired by advanced methods in theoretical physics, but available as easy-to-use software.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2EvugAs

Scientists find unusual behavior in topological material

Argonne scientists have identified a new class of topological materials made by inserting transition metal atoms into the atomic lattice of a well-known two-dimensional material.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NPERWp

Cryocooler cools an accelerator cavity

Particle accelerators are made of structures called cavities, which impart energy to the particle beam, kicking it forward. One type of cavity is the superconducting radio-frequency, or SRF, cavity. Usually made of niobium, SRF cavities require extreme cold to operate. A Fermilab team developed a new way of cooling SRF cavities without liquid helium. The new system is easier to operate and simpler to construct.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2q12y4s

A Bose-Einstein condensate has been produced in space for the first time

An international team of researchers has successfully produced a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in space for the first time. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes creating a small experimental device that was carried on a rocket into space and the experiments that were conducted during its freefall.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CTkcjd

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Study supports Standard Model of particle physics, excludes alternative models

In a new study, researchers at Northwestern, Harvard and Yale universities examined the shape of an electron's charge with unprecedented precision to confirm that it is perfectly spherical. A slightly squashed charge could have indicated unknown, hard-to-detect heavy particles in the electron's presence, a discovery that could have upended the global physics community.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NL9Kv2

Physicists create guidelines for non-equilibrium measurements of many-body systems

When it comes to non-equilibrium physics, not all assumptions are created equal. At least, those are the latest findings from NC State physicist Lex Kemper and colleagues from NC State and Georgetown University.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2AfpaUx

Acrylic tanks provide clear window into dark matter detection

Scientists have a new window into the search for dark matter – an acrylic vessel that features a grouping of 12-foot-tall transparent tanks with 1-inch-thick walls.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Cn5ekd

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

New memristor boosts accuracy and efficiency for neural networks on an atomic scale

Just like their biological counterparts, hardware that mimics the neural circuitry of the brain requires building blocks that can adjust how they synapse, with some connections strengthening at the expense of others. One such approach, called memristors, uses current resistance to store this information. New work looks to overcome reliability issues in these devices by scaling memristors to the atomic level.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2PHE5MU

New reservoir computer marks first-ever microelectromechanical neural network application

As artificial intelligence has become increasingly sophisticated, it has inspired renewed efforts to develop computers whose physical architecture mimics the human brain. One approach, called reservoir computing, allows hardware devices to achieve the higher-dimension calculations required by emerging artificial intelligence. One new device highlights the potential of extremely small mechanical systems to achieve these calculations.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2IZKj8e

Fermilab scientists to look for dark matter using quantum technology

Fermilab scientists are harnessing quantum technology in the search for dark matter.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Ck3qIQ

The state of the early universe: The beginning was fluid

Scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and their colleagues from the international ALICE collaboration recently collided xenon nuclei in the superconducting Large Hadron Collider in order to gain new insights into the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The QGP is a special state consisting of quarks and the gluons that bind the quarks together. The results were published in Physics Letters B.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2RSWGa3

Monday, October 15, 2018

Hawking's final book offers brief answers to big questions

Stephen Hawking's final work, which tackles issues from the existence of God to the potential for time travel, was launched on Monday by his children, who helped complete the book after the British astrophysics giant's death.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2P4HaJw

Researchers announce the discovery of an atomic electronic simulator

Targeting applications like neural networks for machine learning, a new discovery out of the University of Alberta and Quantum Silicon Inc. in Edmonton, Canada is paving the way for atomic ultra-efficient electronics, the need for which is increasingly critical in our data-driven society. The key to unlocking untold potential for the greenest electronics? Creating bespoke atomic patterns to in turn control electrons.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2QRaIHV

Study exposes security vulnerabilities in terahertz data links

A new study shows that terahertz data links, which may play a role in ultra-high-speed wireless data networks of the future, aren't as immune to eavesdropping as many researchers have assumed. The research, published in the journal Nature, shows that it is possible for a clever eavesdropper to intercept a signal from a terahertz transmitter without the intrusion being detected at the receiver.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2yEBTOO

Ionic decision-maker capable of self-learning

A NIMS research group has invented an ionic device, termed an ionic decision-maker, capable of quickly making its own decisions based on previous experience using changes in ionic/molecular concentrations. The group then succeeded in demonstrating its operation. This device is capable of making decisions while efficiently adapting to changing situations by a means unrelated to the storage of past experiences in computer memory or to the performance of decision-making computations. This invention may lead to the development of novel artificial intelligence (AI) systems able to process analog information using hardware in a completely different manner from conventional AI systems that process digital information using software.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2yAP17w

Using puffed rice to simulate collapsing ice shelves and rockfill dams

A pair of researchers at the University of Sydney has found that puffed rice and milk can serve as a stand-in to simulate collapsing ice shelves and rockfill dams. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, Itai Einav and François Guillard discuss their experiments with rice and milk in their lab and what they believe it showed them about real-world collapse events.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2QT4MhK

Friday, October 12, 2018

Researchers model how toxic proteins course through the brain, lead to disease

Many neurodegenerative diseases spread by hijacking the brain's connective circuitry to transport toxic proteins, which gradually accumulate and trigger symptoms of dementias. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology and colleagues have modeled how these toxic proteins spread throughout the brain to reproduce the telltale patterns of atrophy associated with Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2A6tCFm

Researchers discuss the probability of finding a gluon inside the pion

Researchers from NC State University have determined the probability of finding a gluon inside the pion. The Abstract sat down with graduate student and lead author Patrick Barry and his research advisor Chueng Ji, professor of physics at NC State, to talk about what this finding means for our understanding of how the universe works.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2ORjCba

Team simulates how Alzheimer's disease spreads through the brain

For the first time, scientists have developed a computer simulation of how clumps of defective proteins in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's spread through the brain, much of the time in stealth mode, over as long as 30 years.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2yyrrbn

Thursday, October 11, 2018

A tiny antenna could be good for your health—all you have to do is stick it in your brain

Antennas have come a long way from the rabbit ears on your old TV. But the antenna that Northeastern doctoral student Hwaider Lin has been working on since 2015 is about 100 times smaller than the one currently in your smartphone.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CAGVAp

New tool simultaneously senses magnetic fields in various directions

Imagine trying to make sense of the cacophony of a speaker playing four songs at once, and you have some idea of the challenge faced by Jenny Schloss and Matt Turner.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2EbRYS5

'Fudge factors' in physics?

Science is poised to take a "quantum leap" as more mysteries of how atoms behave and interact with each other are unlocked.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2A4Pb8Z

Steering material scientists to better memory devices

Ideally, next-generation AI technologies should understand all our requests and commands, extracting them from a huge background of irrelevant information, in order to rapidly provide relevant answers and solutions to our everyday needs. Making these "smart" AI technologies pervasive—in our smartphones, our homes, and our cars—will require energy-efficient AI hardware, which we at IBM Research plan to build around novel and highly capable analog memory devices.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OgkuGN

Stephen Hawking: Master of the multiverse

The multiverse challenges science as we know it, and Hawking wasn't pleased with it. But our journey to the edges of time has since reshaped our vision of the cosmos, and ourselves.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OUEMFc

New NSLS-II beamline illuminates electronic structures

On July 15, 2018, the Soft Inelastic X-ray Scattering (SIX) beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory—welcomed its first visiting researchers. SIX is an experimental station designed to measure the electronic properties of solid materials using ultrabright x-rays. The materials can be as small as a few microns—one millionth of a meter.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2QIyPsf

Improved amplifier technology for use in positron emission tomography

In the EU project ENEFRF, researchers at the Ångström Laboratory are working on improving the radio frequency amplifiers that will make technology for cancer diagnostics more efficient, accessible, and affordable. "We are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of PET scans and therefore the costs for society. With upgraded technology, the costs for maintenance and operation will be reduced," says Dragos Dancila, Docent in Applied Physics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2EcPSRZ

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Ancient pigment can boost energy efficiency

A color developed by Egyptians thousands of years ago has a modern-day application as well – the pigment can boost energy efficiency by cooling rooftops and walls, and could also enable solar generation of electricity via windows.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2C79Qe6

Three renowned scientists: Heusler, Weyl and Berry

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute Chemical Physics of Solids have written a review paper about magnetic topological materials in the family of Heusler compounds. The review explains the connection between topology, symmetry and magnetism at a level suitable for undergraduate students in physics, chemistry and materials science with a basic knowledge of condensed matter physics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NyPBs3

The cosmological lithium problem

The international collaborative n_TOF, in which a group of University of Seville researchers participated, has made use of the unique capacities of three of the world's nuclear facilities to carry out a new experiment aimed at finding an explanation of the cosmological lithium problem. This problem is among the still unresolved questions of the current standard description of the Big Bang. The new experimental results, their theoretical interpretations and their implications have been published in Physical Review Letters.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2ORLwng

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Freeloaders beware: Incentives to foster cooperation are just around the corner

In our society, there are always a certain percentage of people who adopt a freeloader attitude. They let other members of society do all the work and do not do their part. By not contributing their share of effort, to the detriment of the rest of society, freeloaders pose a serious social threat, and can even lead to social collapse. In a new study published in EPJ B, Chunpeng Du from Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming, China, and colleagues show that it is possible to incentivise members of society to cooperate by providing them fixed bonuses and, thus, prevent freeloader behaviour from becoming prevalent.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2E5PkNA

Statistical method recreates the history of a long-abandoned village

Archaeologists now have new tools for studying the development of medieval villages and the transformation of the historical landscapes surrounding them. In a study recently published in EPJ Plus, scientists have attempted to reconstruct the history of Zornoztegi, an abandoned medieval village located in the Basque Country, Spain. To do so they rely on the various analysis methods available to archaeologists, including radiocarbon dating, archaeological and historical records, archaeobotanical and optical microscope analyses of samples found on the site, together with a statistical analysis model. Paola Ricci from the University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli" in Italy and colleagues used this approach to establish the history of the village in the time leading up to the Middle Ages.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2ObzZj8

Precise electron spin control yields faster memory storage

Data storage devices are not improving as fast as scientists would like. Faster and more compact memory storage devices will become a reality when physicists gain precise control of the spins of electrons. They typically rely on ultra-short lasers to control spins. However, improvement of storage devices via spin control requires first to develop ways of controlling the forces acting on these electronic spins. In a recent study published in EPJ B, John Kay Dewhurst and colleagues, have developed a new theory to predict the complex dynamics of spin procession once a material is subjected to ultra-short laser pulses. The advantage of this approach, which takes into account the effect of internal spin rotation forces, is that it is predictive.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2A2E2pv

Monday, October 8, 2018

Is dark energy even allowed in string theory?

A new conjecture is the cause of excitement in the string theory community. Timm Wrase of the Vienna University of Technology has now published his much-discussed results on recent new developments.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2IKL70m

Nuclear technique helps validate theoretical model for optimised laser material deposition in additive manufacturing

Neutron diffraction strain scanning measurements at ANSTO have validated a new theoretical model that successfully predicts the residual stresses and critical deposition heights for laser additive manufacturing.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2RB1Rv3

Friday, October 5, 2018

Scientists get the drop on the cell's nucleus

A team of physicists has devised a novel strategy that uses naturally occurring motions inside the human cell nucleus to measure the physical properties of the nucleus and its components. The method, which reveals that human nucleoli behave as liquid droplets, offers a potential new means for illuminating the physical properties of unhealthy cells, such as those linked to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2IE1v2J

Interdisciplinary study finds cell networks seek optimal point between stability and adaptiveness

Biologists know a lot about how life works, but they are still figuring out the big questions of why life exists, why it takes various shapes and sizes, and how life is able to amazingly adapt to fill every nook and cranny on Earth.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2IDKVQw

The early universe was a fluid quark-gluon plasma

Scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and their colleagues from the international ALICE collaboration recently collided xenon nuclei, in order to gain new insights into the properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (the QGP) – the matter that the universe consisted of up to a microsecond after the Big Bang. The QGP, as the name suggests, is a special state consisting of the fundamental particles, the quarks, and the particles that bind the quarks together, the gluons. The result was obtained using the ALICE experiment at the 27 km long superconducting Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The result is now published in Physics Letters B.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2E0qdMe

Neutrons scan magnetic fields inside samples

With a newly developed neutron tomography technique, an HZB team has mapped for the first time magnetic field lines inside materials at the BER II research reactor. Tensorial neutron tomography promises new insights into superconductors, battery electrodes and other energy-related materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2RvI686

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Nobel-winning physics key to ultra-fast laser research

The technique for generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses developed by the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics winners, Professor Gérard Mourou and Dr. Donna Strickland, provides the basis for important scientific approaches used in Swinburne's research.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OzWWfn

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

A new brain-inspired architecture could improve how computers handle data and advance AI

IBM researchers are developing a new computer architecture, better equipped to handle increased data loads from artificial intelligence. Their designs draw on concepts from the human brain and significantly outperform conventional computers in comparative studies. They report on their recent findings in the Journal of Applied Physics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2O73CCs

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Canadian Nobel physics laureate hails womens' progress

Canada's Donna Strickland, the first female Nobel Prize winner in physics since 1963, said Tuesday that women have "come a long way" since the previous laureate, Maria Goeppert Mayer.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Ni5SBl

Female Nobel winner a long time coming, and a drop in the ocean

When Canadian scientist Donna Strickland got the early morning call informing her she just won the Nobel Physics Prize, she could barely hide her amazement.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2y9S7ze

Breaking supersymmetry

The remarkable discoveries and theories of physicists since the 1930s have shown that all matter in the universe is made from a small number of basic building blocks called fundamental particles. However, this isn't the complete story. Supersymmetry is a hypothesis in high-energy physics that aims to fill some of the gaps.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2zLQ0DR

Black holes ruled out as universe's missing dark matter

For one brief shining moment after the 2015 detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, astronomers held out hope that the universe's mysterious dark matter might consist of a plenitude of black holes sprinkled throughout the universe.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NhOPPZ

Possible explanation for excess of electron neutrinos detected by IceCube Neutrino Observatory

A pair of researchers with the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark has come up with a possible explanation for the excess of electron neutrinos detected by researchers at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Peter Denton and Irene Tamborra describe their ideas and how they arrived at them.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2y6JoxC

Physicist's discovery recasts 'lifetime hierarchy' of subatomic particles

Researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences have determined that the lifetime of the so-called charmed omega—part of a family of subatomic particles called baryons—is nearly four times longer than previously thought.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Ot7vk9

Transition metal dichalcogenides could increase computer speed, memory

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) possess optical properties that could be used to make computers run a million times faster and store information a million times more energy-efficiently, according to a study led by Georgia State University.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2DRavmu

Reaction of a quantum fluid to photoexcitation of dissolved particles observed for the first time

In his research, Markus Koch, Associate Professor at the Institute of Experimental Physics of Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), concentrates on processes in molecules and clusters which take place on time scales of picoseconds (10-12 seconds) and femtoseconds (10-15 seconds).

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2IvWBVp

Rugby or football? ISOLDE reveals shape-shifting character of Mercury isotopes

An unprecedented combination of experimental nuclear physics and theoretical and computational modelling techniques has been brought together to reveal the full extent of the odd-even shape staggering of exotic mercury isotopes, and explain how it happens.  The result, from an international team at the ISOLDE nuclear physics facility at CERN1, published today in Nature Physics, demonstrates and explains a phenomenon unique to mercury isotopes where the shape of the atomic nuclei dramatically moves between a football and rugby ball.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2zMBI5I

First experiments at new X-ray laser reveal unknown structure of antibiotics killer

An international collaboration led by DESY and consisting of over 120 researchers has announced the results of the first scientific experiments at Europe's new X-ray laser, European XFEL. The pioneering work not only demonstrates that the new research facility can speed up experiments by more than an order of magnitude, it also reveals a previously unknown structure of an enzyme responsible for antibiotics resistance. "The groundbreaking work of the first team to use the European XFEL has paved the way for all users of the facility who greatly benefit from these pioneering experiments," emphasises European XFEL managing director Robert Feidenhans'l. "We are very pleased—these results show that the facility works even better than we had expected and is ready to deliver new scientific breakthroughs." The scientists present their results, including the first new protein structure solved at the European XFEL, in the journal Nature Communications.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Nf9Lac

Trio win Nobel Physics Prize for laser research

Three researchers on Tuesday shared the 2018 Nobel Physics Prize for inventions in the field of laser physics which have paved the way for advanced precision instruments used in corrective eye surgery and industry, the jury said.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2xQrn7u

Monday, October 1, 2018

Nobel Prize in physics to be announced Tuesday

The Nobel Prize for physics honors researchers for discoveries in phenomena as enormous as The Big Bang and as tiny as single particles of light.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2y6zqfT

A 'recipe book' that creates color centers in silicon carbide crystals

Silicon carbide (SiC), a material known for its toughness with applications from abrasives to car brakes, to high-temperature power electronics, has enjoyed renewed interest for its potential in quantum technology. Its ability to house optically excitable defects, called color centers, has made it a strong candidate material to become the building block of quantum computing.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2QnMtRv

Songbird data yields new theory for learning sensorimotor skills

Songbirds learn to sing in a way similar to how humans learn to speak—by listening to their fathers and trying to duplicate the sounds. The bird's brain sends commands to the vocal muscles to sing what it hears, and then the brain keeps trying to adjust the command until the sound echoes the one made by the parent.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Qp2HKi

Modern modulators for Fermilab accelerators

Take a walk along the hall that houses Fermilab's linear accelerator, and you'll see tall sets of brightly lit shelves that resemble fancy vending machines. But instead of snacks and beverages, they hold boxy structures that resemble gleaming car batteries. Arranged in neat columns and rows, these cells—known as Marx cells and installed during the last 36 months—have rejuvenated the aging Fermilab linear accelerator, or Fermilab Linac, and help guarantee its exceptional performance for the decade to come.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2IsvACi

New evidence suggests particles detected in Antarctica don't fit Standard Model

A team of researchers at Penn State University has found new evidence that suggests some particles detected in Antarctica do not fit the Standard Model. They have written a paper outlining their arguments and have posted it on the arXiv preprint server.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OnfijG