New mathematical approach tested for the search of flight MH370

The 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 remains ones of the biggest mysteries in aviation. More than $150 million has been spent so far to identify where the plane carrying 239 passengers crashed into the Indian Ocean, with no success. Recent efforts combining satellite data with a new mathematical approach aim to make headway in the search for plane crashes.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WfTwii

LS2 report: Before the return of the cold

Since the start of January, the liquid helium flowing through the veins of the LHC's cooling system has gradually been removed the accelerator and, one by one, the eight sectors of the LHC have been brought back to room temperature. "It takes about four weeks to bring a single sector from its nominal temperature of 1.9 K (-271°C) back to room temperature," explains Krzysztof Brodzinski, an engineer working on the operation of the LHC's cryogenic system. At least 135 tonnes of helium are required to supply the whole of the LHC's cryogenic system. Once it has been brought up to the surface, some of this precious cooling agent is stored at CERN and the remainder (about 80 tonnes) is entrusted to the suppliers for the duration of LS2.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2DDrwxU

What a never-before-seen radioactive decay could tell us about neutrinos

Bill Fairbank is looking for... nothing.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2PDaTr1

Researchers find a better power law that predicts earthquakes, blood vessels, bank accounts

Giant earthquakes and extreme wealth may not appear to have much in common, but the frequency with which the "Big One" will hit San Francisco and how often someone will earn as much money as Bill Gates can both be predicted with a statistical measurement called a power law exponent.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2L3iLmY

Unprecedented insight into two-dimensional magnets using diamond quantum sensors

For the first time, physicists at the University of Basel have succeeded in measuring the magnetic properties of atomically thin van der Waals materials on the nanoscale. They used diamond quantum sensors to determine the strength of the magnetization of individual atomic layers of the material chromium triiodide. In addition, they found a long-sought explanation for the unusual magnetic properties of the material. The journal Science has published the findings.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2INcvhg

Avengers: Endgame exploits time travel and quantum mechanics as it tries to restore the universe

At the end of Avengers: Infinity War half the people (including heroes and villains) in the universe were gone in the snap of a finger from Thanos (Josh Brolin).

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2ZriDAO

Extracting something from nothing: A bright glow from empty space

Particles travelling through empty space can emit bright flashes of gamma rays by interacting with the quantum vacuum, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Strathclyde.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2PuiwQD

New lens system for brighter, sharper diffraction images

To design and improve energy storage materials, smart devices, and many more technologies, researchers need to understand their hidden structure and chemistry. Advanced research techniques, such as ultra-fast electron diffraction imaging can reveal that information. Now, a group of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new and improved version of electron diffraction at Brookhaven's Accelerator Test Facility (ATF)—a DOE Office of Science User Facility that offers advanced and unique experimental instrumentation for studying particle acceleration to researchers from all around the world. The researchers published their findings in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal by Nature Research.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2UFCg4G

Dark matter detector observes rarest event ever recorded

How do you observe a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe? The XENON Collaboration research team did it with an instrument built to find the most elusive particle in the universe—dark matter. In a paper to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature, researchers announce that they have observed the radioactive decay of xenon-124, which has a half-life of 1.8 X 1022 years.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2GvbHtP

Water walking—the new mode of rock skipping

Researchers at Utah State University's Splash Lab discovered a new mode of water surface skipping termed "water walking".

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2W2OYvN

Controlling instabilities gives closer look at chemistry from hypersonic vehicles

While studying the chemical reactions that occur in the flow of gases around a vehicle moving at hypersonic speeds, researchers at the University of Illinois used a less-is-more method to gain greater understanding of the role of chemical reactions in modifying unsteady flows that occur in the hypersonic flow around a double-wedge shape.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2ZqjUZ7

High-fidelity simulations point the way to optimizing heat transfer in current and next-generation reactors

Engineers must manage a maelstrom in the core of operating nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactions deposit an extraordinary amount of heat in the fuel rods, setting off a frenzy of boiling, bubbling, and evaporation in surrounding fluid. From this churning flow, operators harness the removal of heat.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2GsFjbe

Droplet trains reveal how nature navigates blood traffic

Nearing a decision point, online traffic maps recommend a less-crowded route over the other ways with several slow spots. For most of us, the choice seems clear. Still, have you ever wondered whether this collectively preferring one path may result in a new traffic jam along the chosen road? Indeed, traffic congestions constantly change as the accumulation of drivers' preferences for the "faster path" create new problems. These alternating groups in a system are called a network oscillation. From roadways to computer cable routers and blood vessels, our life is woven in networks of networks. Oscillation is an ubiquitous phenomenon of networks, which are characterized by sets of nodes and paths to choose.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2ISe5hg

Defying the laws of physics? Engineers demonstrate bubbles of sand

The flow of granular materials, such as sand and catalytic particles used in chemical reactors, and enables a wide range of natural phenomena, from mudslides to volcanos, as well as a broad array of industrial processes, from pharmaceutical production to carbon capture. While the motion and mixing of granular matter often display striking similarities to liquids, as in moving sand dunes, avalanches, and quicksand, the physics underlying granular flows is not as well-understood as liquid flows.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Xz3s6W

Study shows the difference between classical flows and superfluid helium in 3-D counter-flow

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the University of Rome, CNRS and the University of Helsinki have recently carried out a study investigating the difference between 3-D anisotropic turbulence in classical fluids and that in superfluids, such as helium. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters (PRL), are supported by both theory and experimental evidence.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2UwlIMl

Thermodynamic magic enables cooling without energy consumption

Physicists at the University of Zurich have developed an amazingly simple device that allows heat to flow temporarily from a cold to a warm object without an external power supply. Intriguingly, the process initially appears to contradict the fundamental laws of physics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2VWwKMf

Study outlines new proposal for probing the primordial universe

Most everybody is familiar with the Big Bang—the notion that an impossibly hot, dense universe exploded into the one we know today. But what do we know about what came before?

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2UKyYlx

New book traces expeditions to test Einstein's theory of relativity

No Shadow of a Doubt, a new book by Daniel Kennefick, associate professor of physics at the University of Arkansas, tells the story of two research teams, organized by Arthur Stanley Eddington and Sir Frank Watson Dyson, who tested Einstein's theory of relativity. These expeditions traveled to Brazil and Africa to collect images of stars during the 1919 eclipse, and their results confirmed and brought mainstream attention to the theory.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2GxBh2M

CEBAF turns on the charm

The world's most advanced particle accelerator for investigating the quark structure of the atom's nucleus has just charmed physicists with a new capability. The production of charm quarks in J/ψ (J/psi) particles by CEBAF at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility confirms that the facility has expanded the realm of precision nuclear physics research with electron beams to higher energies.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2GrUJwC

Lasers make magnets behave like fluids

For years, researchers have pursued a strange phenomenon: When you hit an ultra-thin magnet with a laser, it suddenly de-magnetizes. Imagine the magnet on your refrigerator falling off.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2PkoZgH

Spin flipper upends protons

Protons spin. It's an intrinsic property that can affect experiments at accelerators that use beams of protons. Yet flipping proton spins could offer insights into nuclear physics experiments that study the first moments of the universe in a laboratory setting. A new "spin flipper" magnet assembly efficiently reverses the spin direction of protons circulating in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). These flips change the particle's spin with 97 percent efficiency without changing other beam characteristics. This flipping is essential to eliminate systematic errors that might be caused by protons having one spin direction throughout an experiment.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2GrIW10

Researchers report observation of room-temperature polar skyrmions

An international team of researchers has discovered a way to create and observe room-temperature polar skyrmions. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes creating the polar skyrmions and their observations. Pavlo Zubko, with the London Centre for Nanotechnology, has published a News and Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2v8WLfP

Scientists invent way to trap mysterious 'dark world' particle at Large Hadron Collider

Now that they've identified the Higgs boson, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have set their sights on an even more elusive target.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2ILyJQ5

Researchers develop new variant of Maxwell's demon at nanoscale

Maxwell's demon is a machine proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1897. The hypothetical machine would use thermal fluctuations to obtain energy, apparently violating the second principle of thermodynamics. Now, researchers at the University of Barcelona have presented the first theoretical and experimental solution of a continuous version of Maxwell's demon in a single molecule system. The results, published in the journal Nature Physics, have applications in other fields, such as biological and quantum systems.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2IGqG6Q

Morphing origami takes a new shape, expanding use possibilities

Origami-based structures have been used to create deployable solar arrays for space, adaptable acoustic systems for symphony halls and even crash protection systems for flying drones.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2VbdAVK

New study helps decode the movement patterns of tsunami-like solitary waves

A certain phenomenon has confounded scientists for almost two centuries: lone waves, strangely tall and fast, moving independently of the ebb and flow around them.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2vcdi2g

Researchers explore machine learning to automate sorting of microcapsules in real-time

Micro-encapsulated CO2 sorbents (MECS)—tiny, reusable capsules full of a sodium carbonate solution that can absorb carbon dioxide from the air—are a promising technology for capturing carbon from the atmosphere. To create the caviar-like objects, scientists run three fluids through a series of microfluidic components to create drops that turn into capsules when exposed to ultraviolet light downstream. However, fluid properties and flow rates can change during experiments. These changes can lead to capsules that are defective, improperly-sized or otherwise unusable, resulting in device clogging, contaminated samples and wasted time.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2VbiKB8

Scientists develop way to identify topological materials

In the decades since they were first theorized, scientists have suggested that the exotic properties of topological materials—that is, materials that maintain their electrical properties even in the face of radical temperature shifts or structural deformation—could result in everything from more energy-efficient electronics to the development of novel superconductors and quantum computers.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2ZhgWGg

Maths shows the nature of 'tipping points' for climate and eco crises

Humans need to be wary of breaching a 'point of no return' that leads to ecological disaster such as loss of rainforests or irreversible climate change, according to the most detailed study of its kind.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2V1nh9f

The first direct search for inelastic boosted dark matter with a terrestrial detector

A team of researchers in the Republic of Korea, the U.S., Brazil, Indonesia and the U.K. have recently carried out a direct search for inelastic boosted dark matter (IBDM) using a terrestrial detector. Their study, published in Physical Review Letters (PRL), is the first ever to search experimentally for IBDM using a terrestrial detector.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2KM3RRY

Spinning new targets for accelerators

Bob Zwaska, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab, was watching a contestant on the cooking show Chopped spin sugar for their dessert when he realized the same principle might be applicable to accelerator targets.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2VI6rcJ

Getting a smart tattoo without a needle

A tattoo that is warning you for too many hours of sunlight exposure, or is alerting you for taking your medication? Next to their cosmetic role, tattoos could get new functionality using intelligent ink. That would require more precise and less invasive injection technique. Researchers of the University of Twente now develop a micro-jet injection technology that doesn't use needles at all. Instead, an ultrafast liquid jet with the thickness of a human hair penetrates the skin. It isn't painful and there is less waste. In their new publication in the American Journal of Applied Physics, the scientists compare both the needle and the fluid jet approach.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2v6s1fh

Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

A Harvard physicist has shown that wormholes can exist: tunnels in curved space-time, connecting two distant places, through which travel is possible.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Uk2NnI

Gravitational echo phenomenon will become a key to the new physics, physicist says

Gravitational echoes may be caused by the collision of two black holes, and may indicate that these objects have completely new physical properties. This conclusion was made by RUDN physicists after a series of mathematical calculations. The scientists state that if the existence of the echo phenomenon is confirmed, astrophysicists would have to reconsider their view of compact space objects. The results of the study were published in Physical Review D.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2VMT1Mr

The discrete-time physics hiding inside our continuous-time world

Scientists believe that time is continuous, not discrete—roughly speaking, they believe that it does not progress in "chunks," but rather "flows," smoothly and continuously. So they often model the dynamics of physical systems as continuous-time "Markov processes," named after mathematician Andrey Markov. Indeed, scientists have used these processes to investigate a range of real-world processes from folding proteins, to evolving ecosystems, to shifting financial markets, with astonishing success.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2VNbSr0

Texts as networks: How many words are sufficient to identify an author?

People are more original than they think—this is suggested by a literary text analysis method of stylometry proposed by scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences. The author's individuality can be seen in the connections between no more than a dozen words in an English text. It turns out that in Slavic languages, authorship identification requires even fewer words, and is more certain.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2X87O4J

Study confirms the precise nature of fractional crystallization in hard sphere mixtures

Although several past studies have investigated the formation of crystals from identical particles, the conditions under which non-uniform particles crystallize and the crystals resulting from this process are still poorly understood. In a recent study published in Physical Review Letters (PRL), researchers at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg have gathered interesting findings about the formation of complex crystals from size-disperse spheres.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2v3sW0a

SLAC develops novel compact antenna for communicating where radios fail

A new type of pocket-sized antenna, developed at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, could enable mobile communication in situations where conventional radios don't work, such as under water, through the ground and over very long distances through air.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2v1cVrB

New research adds to work of Prandtl, father of modern aerodynamics

In 1942, Ludwig Prandtl—considered the father of modern aerodynamics—published "Führer durch die Strömungslehre," the first book of its time on fluid mechanics and translated to English from the German language in 1952 as "Essentials of Fluid Mechanics." The book was uniquely successful such that Prandtl's students continued to maintain and develop the book with new findings after his death. Today, the work is available under the revised title "Prandtl—Essentials of Fluid Mechanics," as an expanded and revised version of the original book with contributions by leading researchers in the field of fluid mechanics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2G4ssfg

Team makes artificial atoms that work at room temp

Ultra-secure online communications, completely indecipherable if intercepted, is one step closer with the help of a recently published discovery by University of Oregon physicist Ben Alemán.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2D8aLeb

Scientists create a super-fast robot microscope to search for dark matter

Researchers from the National University of science and technology MISIS (NUST MISIS, Moscow, Russia) and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN, Naples, Italy) have developed a simple and cost-effective technology that allows increasing the speed of automated microscopes (AM) by 10 to 100 times. The microscopes' speed increase will help scientists in many fields: medicine, nuclear physics, astrophysics, neutrino physics, archaeology, geology, volcanology, etc. The development report was published in Scientific Reports.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Ga4K1d

New device in Z machine measures power for nuclear fusion

If you're chasing the elusive goal of nuclear fusion and think you need a bigger reactor to do the job, you first might want to know precisely how much input energy emerging from the wall plug is making it to the heart of your machine.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2uZzA7q

Pedestrians at crosswalks found to follow the Levy walk process

A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo has found that large numbers of pedestrians meeting in crosswalks tend to follow the Lévy walk process. In their paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the group outlines their work observing crowd movement and what they found.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2G1G7DU

Sorting out sick from healthy blood cells—physicists discover new effect

In numerous diseases such as malaria or cancer, diseased and healthy blood and body cells differ in their degree of hardness. Now, they can be easily separated from each other by a new physical effect. In the process, flow through microchannels ensure that the cells separate out into streams of harder and softer cells. This has now been discovered by an international research team led by Bayreuth physicist Prof. Dr. Walter Zimmermann. In the journal Physical Review Letters, the scientists present their fundamental findings and demonstrate their potential for medical applications.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Uph47A

Measurement of semiconductor material quality is now 100,000 times more sensitive

The enhanced power of the new measuring technique to characterize materials at scales much smaller than any current technologies will accelerate the discovery and investigation of 2-D, micro- and nanoscale materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2U3i1xu

Using artificial intelligence to understand collective behavior

Professor Thomas Müller and Professor Hans Briegel have been carrying out research on a machine learning model for several years that differs significantly from alternative artificial intelligence (AI) learning models. The philosopher from Konstanz and the theoretical physicist from the University of Innsbruck have integrated methods of philosophical action theory and quantum optics. Their "Projective Simulation" learning model has already been successfully applied in basic research.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2G9KtK9

ATLAS experiment measures Higgs boson coupling to top quark in diphoton channel with full Run 2 dataset

In 2018, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at CERN announced the observation of the production of the Higgs boson in association with a top-quark pair, known as "ttH" production. This result was the first observation of the Higgs boson coupling to quarks. It was followed shortly by the observation of Higgs boson decays to bottom quarks.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2FY607u

In cellular world, strong relationships the key to healing old wounds

Yale scientists with colleagues at University College London have taken the next step towards unravelling how cells work together during wound closure, a question that could be fundamental to determining optimal healing rates after injury or disease.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2VxPwJT

Observing a molecule stretch and bend in real-time

Being able to watch how molecules bend, stretch, break or transform during chemical reactions requires state-of-the-art instruments and techniques that can observe and track all the atoms within a molecule with high sub-atomic spatial and temporal resolution.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2OYCxOQ

Newly devised static negative capacitor could improve computing

With a little physics ingenuity, scientists have designed a way to redistribute electricity on a small scale, potentially opening new avenues of research into more energy-efficient computing.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2UvNBcs

The cost of computation

For decades, physicists have wrestled with understanding the thermodynamic cost of manipulating information, what we would now call computing. How much energy does it take, for example, to erase a single bit from a computer? What about more complicated operations? These are pressing, practical questions, as artificial computers are energy hogs, claiming an estimated four percent of total energy consumed in the United States.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WOaTqy

Time-reversal violation may explain abundance of matter over antimatter, physicist says

Why does the observable universe contain virtually no antimatter? Particles of antimatter have the same mass but opposite electrical charge of their matter counterparts. Very small amounts of antimatter can be created in the laboratory. However, hardly any antimatter is observed elsewhere in the universe.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2uTskKv

Three teams independently show dipolar quantum gasses support state of supersolid properties

Three teams of researchers working independently of one another have shown that certain dipolar quantum gases are able to support a state of supersolid properties. A team led by Giovanni Modugno of the University of Florence has published their findings in Physical Review Letters. The second team, led by Tilman Pfau of the University of Stuttgart, has published their findings in Physical Review X, and the third, led by Francesca Ferlaino of the University of Innsbruck has uploaded their findings to the arXiv preprint server.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Z07iHY

Successful test of the MONSTER spectrometer provided new nuclear structure information

In a landmark experiment at the Accelerator Laboratory of the Department of Physics (JYFL-ACCLAB) at University of Jyväskylä, a beam of the short-lived nuclide 85As was produced through nuclear fission. The research group was successful in testing the modular neutron spectrometer (MONSTER) at JYFL-ACCLAB, a new detector array built by an international collaboration with groups from CIEMAT (Spain), VECC (India), JYFL/HIP (Finland), IFIC (Spain), and UPC (Spain).

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2OZkXKz

Team uncovers the power of dynamically rewiring swarm robotic systems

Our world is filled with hopelessly complicated systems for transportation, finance, biological life, and others. These so-called complex systems, natural or man-made, are systems that are intrinsically challenging to predict due to emergent collective dynamics influenced by external environmental factors.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2uTdq71

Studying the swimming patterns of bacteria near surfaces

A team of researchers at Université Côte d'Azur and Centre Scientifique de Monaco has recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the near-surface swimming patterns of bacteria. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, could shed some light on how bacteria explore surfaces, how they search for host cells and how they infect these cells.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2VoJf2X

Getting a big look at tiny particles

At the turn of the 20th century, scientists discovered that atoms were composed of smaller particles. They found that inside each atom, negatively charged electrons orbit a nucleus made of positively charged protons and neutral particles called neutrons. This discovery led to research into atomic nuclei and subatomic particles.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2KbgBRK

New understanding of heat transfer in boiling water could lead to efficiency improvements in power plants

The simple act of boiling water is one of humankind's oldest inventions, and still central to many of today's technologies, from coffee makers to nuclear power plants. Yet this seemingly simple process has complexities that have long defied full understanding.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2OPSs1J

Microscopic swimmers with visual perception of group members form stable swarms

Birds, fish and bacteria often gather into groups or swarms. This so-called collective behaviour requires all group members to continuously and reciprocally adapt their movements. It can be a challenging task, however, for researchers to ascertain the specific environmental stimuli that individuals respond to within the context of their group; in addition to optical and acoustic information, flow resistances or chemical messengers can also play a role. By designing experiments with artificial microswimmers, physicists at the University of Konstanz were able to show that the formation of stable groups requires only few skills: forward visual perception over large distances and regulation of the speed according to the number of perceived individuals. In addition to providing more insight into collective phenomena, their findings can also be used for research on autonomous systems. The results of their study were published in the current issue of the journal Science.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2TVvt6r

Ghostly X-ray images could provide key info for analyzing X-ray laser experiments

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) produce incredibly powerful beams of light that enable unprecedented studies of the ultrafast motions of atoms in matter. To interpret data taken with these extraordinary light sources, researchers need a solid understanding of how the X-ray pulses interact with matter and how those interactions affect measurements.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Uwwia8

New aerodynamic insights could change the para-cycling podiums

Participants in Para-cycling races – cycling with a disability – would do well to study Paul Mannion's Ph.D. research. At Eindhoven University of Technology and National University of Ireland Galway he has been investigating the aerodynamic resistance of tandem and hand cyclists. The optimal posture appears to give tandem cyclists an advantage of 8.1 seconds per 10 kilometers, while the correct choice of wheels can give hand cyclists a gain of 1.6 seconds per kilometer. This could make the difference between winning or losing.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2uIX8NM

Amplifier for terahertz lattice vibrations in a semiconductor crystal

In analogy to the amplification of light in a laser, vibrations of a semiconductor crystal, so-called phonons, were enhanced by interaction with an electron current. Excitation of a metal-semiconductor nanostructure by intense terahertz (THz) pulses results in a 10-fold amplification of longitudinal optical (LO) phonons at a frequency of 9 THz. Coupling such lattice motions to propagating sound waves holds potential for ultrasound imaging with a sub-nanometer spatial resolution.

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

It's a one-way street for sound waves in this new technology

Imagine being able to hear people whispering in the next room, while the raucous party in your own room is inaudible to the whisperers. Yale researchers have found a way to do just that—make sound flow in one direction—within a fundamental technology found in everything from cell phones to gravitational wave detectors.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2TQg1so

Order hidden in disorder

Partitioning space into cells with optimum geometrical properties is a central challenge in many fields of science and technology. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and colleagues from several countries have now found that in amorphous, i.e. disordered, systems, optimization of the individual cells gradually results in the same structure, although it remains amorphous. The disordered structure quickly converges to hyperuniformity, a hidden order on large scales. This is reported in Nature Communications.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CRJ4WF

Atomic switches by plasmonic heating of metallic contact points

Scientists have recently developed a light controlled nano-switch to lay groundwork for atomic device development in nanotechnology. They engineered the switches at the nanoscale in a first step toward fully integrated electronic device miniaturization. The multidisciplinary research was conducted by Weiqiang Zhang and co-workers, and an international team of collaborators. Results of the study are now published in Light: Science & Applications.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2UpX9ou

A universal description of non-equilibrium colloid phase separation

Liquids, with their flowing dynamics, are often far from equilibrium. This makes it particularly hard to model processes in soft matter or living tissue, which contain liquids. New research from the University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science (IIS) offers an elegant approach to modeling the self-organization of out-of-equilibrium systems.

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

Physicist applies statistical mechanics theories to explain how children learn a language

Eric DeGiuli, a physicist at École Normale Supérieure, has proposed that a human language grammar can be viewed as if it were a physical object, allowing theories such as those in statistical mechanics to explain how a child learns a language. In his paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, he describes his ideas and his hopes that they might one day be associated with neurological evidence.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Uf95Ko

Team harnesses spin of electrons to power tech devices

Building on the Air Force's need to develop tech devices that require minimal charging in the field, the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) is using principles in quantum science and engineering to build a graphene-based logic device. This new technology will improve the energy efficiency of battery-dependent devices from cell phones to computers.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2YMU8xx

Turbulences theory closer high-energy physics than previously thought

Many scientists have been disappointed that no new elementary particles have been discovered at CERN's Large Hadron Collider since the Higgs Boson in 2012. The failure to detect particles that had previously been predicted by theory is only one example of a 'hole' that has recently appeared in the concept of naturalness in theoretical physics. In simple terms, the concept states that physical parameters should depend roughly equally on all the terms used to calculate them, in terms of proportion.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CQc5Cm

Understanding stock market returns: Which models fits best?

Understanding stock market returns hinges on understanding their volatility. Two simple but competing models have been dominant for decades: the Heston model, introduced in 1993, and the multiplicative model, which dates back to 1990. American physicists recently compared the two models by applying them to the United States stock market and using historical data from two indexes: the S&P500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average. In a study published in The European Physical Journal B, Rostislav Serota and colleagues from the University of Cincinnati, OH, USA, demonstrate the clear differences between the two models. Simply put, the Heston model is better for predicting long-time accumulations of stock returns, while the multiplicative model is better suited to predicting daily or several-day returns.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2I9D4Mr

Long range intrinsic ferromagnetism in two-dimensional materials

A collaborative FLEET study has reviewed recent progress in 2-D ferromagnetism, and predict new, possible 2-D ferromagnetic materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2HTNz7q

Stable majorities

How could prebiotic information-bearing DNA sequences survive in the face of competition from a vast excess of shorter molecules with random sequences? LMU scientists now show that a relatively simple mechanism could have done the trick.

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

Gender parity: Not a foregone conclusion in all fields

Women constitute approximately 47 percent of the workforce yet they are still underrepresented at the highest levels of business, government, medical and academic hierarchies.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2HP6Wyp

'Featherweight oxygen' discovery opens window on nuclear symmetry

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered and characterized a new form of oxygen dubbed "featherweight oxygen"—the lightest-ever version of the familiar chemical element oxygen, with only three neutrons to its eight protons.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2I7lLvt

Skyrmions could provide next generation data storage

Scientists at the Universities of Birmingham, Bristol and Colorado, Boulder have moved a step closer to developing the next generation of data storage and processing devices, using an emerging science called skyrmionics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CMIdq8