Researchers demonstrate light-induced locomotion in a nonliquid environment and report a new type of liquid-like motion

Motion is everywhere in living systems and is necessary for mechanical functions in artificial systems, such as robots and machines. Functional mechanical structures that can change volume and shape in response to external stimuli (such as light, heat, electricity, humidity, and chemistry) have a wide range of application prospects in the field of biomechanics and bionic robots. They have attracted immense research interest, particularly at micro- and nanoscales.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/wd1aypM

Nuclear popcorn: Heavy nucleus changes shapes at different energies

A new paper sheds light on the nature of atomic nuclei. The study is published in the journal Physical Review C.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/Cv0RBrb

Physicists observe wormhole dynamics using a quantum computer

Scientists have, for the first time, developed a quantum experiment that allows them to study the dynamics, or behavior, of a special kind of theoretical wormhole. The experiment has not created an actual wormhole (a rupture in space and time), rather it allows researchers to probe connections between theoretical wormholes and quantum physics, a prediction of so-called quantum gravity. Quantum gravity refers to a set of theories that seek to connect gravity with quantum physics, two fundamental and well-studied descriptions of nature that appear inherently incompatible with each other.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3ikopQL

The Kibble-Zurek mechanism for nonequilibrium phase transitions

The Kibble-Zurek (KZ) mechanism, confirmed experimentally only for equilibrium phase transitions, is also applicable for non-equilibrium phase transitions, as is now shown by Tokyo Tech researchers in a new study. The KZ mechanism is characterized by the formation of topological defects during continuous phase transition away from the adiabatic limit. This breakthrough finding could open the doors to investigation of the mechanism for other nonequilibrium phase transitions.

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

Microscopic chains that mimic DNA

Circular polycatenanes are chains that can move and change shape: they twist, stretch and wrap around themselves. Three physicists of the European Eutopia Cost network, coordinated by UniTrento, have dedicated themselves to the study of these structures.

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

New research unearths obscure and contradictory heat transfer behaviors

UCLA researchers and their colleagues have discovered a new physics principle governing how heat transfers through materials, and the finding contradicts the conventional wisdom that heat always moves faster as pressure increases.

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

Physicist identifies how electron crystals melt

The mysterious changes in phases of matter—from solid to liquid and back again—have fascinated Eun-Ah Kim since she was in lower elementary school in South Korea. Without cold drinking water readily available, on hot days the children would bring bottles of frozen water to school.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/OIB89vQ

Synchronizing chaos through a narrow slice of the spectrum

The abstract notion that the whole can be found in each part of something has for long fascinated thinkers engaged in all walks of philosophy and experimental science, from Immanuel Kant on the essence of time to David Bohm on the notion of order, and from the self-similarity of fractal structures to the defining properties of holograms.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/qBrcK0f

First lead-ion collisions in the Large Hadron Collider at record energy

On Friday, November 18, a test using collisions of lead ions was carried out in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and provided an opportunity for the experiments to validate the new detectors and new data-processing systems ahead of next year's lead-lead physics run.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/0gkcvNR

Using machine learning to infer rules for designing complex mechanical metamaterials

Mechanical metamaterials are sophisticated artificial structures with mechanical properties that are driven by their structure, rather than their composition. While these structures have proved to be very promising for the development of new technologies designing them can be both challenging and time-consuming.

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

Physicists strike gold, solving 50-year lightning mystery

The chances of being struck by lightning are less than one in a million, but those odds shortened considerably this month when more than 4.2 million lightning strikes were recorded in every Australian state and territory over the weekend of 12-13 November.

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

How to test whether we're living in a computer simulation

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets and ultimately life to develop? The expansive force of the universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests it should be—allowing matter to clump together rather than being ripped apart.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/PAySVh0

The interplay between epidemics, prevention information, and mass media

When an epidemic strikes, more than just infections spread. As cases mount, information about the disease, how to spot it, and how to prevent it propagates rapidly among people in affected areas as well. Relatively little is known, however, about the interplay between the course of epidemics and this diffusion of information to the public.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/IbLTiR6

Researchers propose design theory for high-homogeneity multilayer Halbach magnet

Portable magnetic resonance (MR) systems have become a hot research topic for low-field MR systems in recent years thanks to the research and development of high homogeneity multilayer Halbach magnets. However, due to the imperfect design theory, current magnet design methods mostly adopt approximate calculation or finite element simulation, which have problems such as low calculation accuracy and time-consuming simulation optimization.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/TdrijU4

Researchers report new technique to measure the fine structure constant

The fine structure constant is one of the most important natural constants of all. At TU Wien, a remarkable way of measuring it has been found—it shows up as a rotation angle.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/96ZdG2X

Connectivity of 3D structures in tissues provides metrics for organ development

Organs in the human body have complex networks of fluid-filled tubes and loops. They come in different shapes, and their three-dimensional structures are differently connected to each other, depending on the organ. During the development of an embryo, organs develop their shape and tissue architecture out of a simple group of cells. It has been challenging to understand how shape and the complex tissue network arise during organ development.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/lS7hXsv

Global timekeepers vote to scrap leap second by 2035

Scientists and government representatives meeting at a conference in France voted on Friday to scrap leap seconds by 2035, the organization responsible for global timekeeping said.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/gS5hrEH

Physics study shows that sheep flocks alternate their leader and achieve collective intelligence

The collective motion of animals in a group is a fascinating topic of research for many scientists. Understanding these collective behaviors can sometimes inspire the development of strategies for promoting positive social change, as well as technologies that emulate nature.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/o89z1vU

High-power electrostatic actuators to realize artificial muscles

Electrostatic actuators are simple and lightweight devices that emulate human muscles. However, their usage has primarily been restricted to moving small devices since they need high voltages to generate significant forces. Now, however, it may be possible to use electrostatic actuators in artificial muscles thanks to research from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) that makes use of ferroelectric materials to create an electrostatic actuator that can generate a strong force at a low driving voltage.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/mZ7X1QB

Powerful linear accelerator begins smashing atoms—how it could reveal rare forms of matter

Just a few hundred feet from where we are sitting is a large metal chamber devoid of air and draped with the wires needed to control the instruments inside. A beam of particles passes through the interior of the chamber silently at around half the speed of light until it smashes into a solid piece of material, resulting in a burst of rare isotopes.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/uCA4deZ

A bench-top Kibble balance to perform ultrasonic power measurements

In 2019, the International System of Units (SI) was redefined in terms of constants that relate to the natural world. This assures the future stability of the SI and opens the opportunity for the use of new technologies, including quantum technologies, to implement the new definitions. This ever-improving accuracy needs to be enabled by stable measurement standards underpinned by agreed definitions of measurement units.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/PWm7Y1w

Recent searches for light fermionic dark matter by the PandaX-4T collaboration

Teams of astrophysicists worldwide are trying to observe different possible types of dark matter (DM), hypothetical matter in the universe that does not emit, absorb or reflect light and would thus be very difficult to detect. Fermionic DM, however, which would be made of fermions, has so far been primarily explored theoretically.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/53rmLO8

Advances in spectroscopy: Physicists find new way to measure properties of a material's surface layer

Physicists at The University of Texas at Arlington have developed a new technique that can measure the properties of the topmost atomic layer of materials without including information from the underlying layers.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/FjYXJ0d

Synthetic black holes radiate like real ones

Research led by the University of Amsterdam has demonstrated that elusive radiation coming from black holes can be studied by mimicking it in the lab.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/Jf6RxWN

Researchers reveal secret of ultra-slow motion of pine cones

In a study recently published in Nature Materials, Prof. Wang Shutao from the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry (TICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Prof. Liu Huan from Beihang University revealed the secret of ultra-slow motion of pine cones and developed mimicking actuators enabling unperceivable motion.

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

'One of the greatest damn mysteries of physics': The most precise astronomical test of electromagnetism yet

There's an awkward, irksome problem with our understanding of nature's laws which physicists have been trying to explain for decades. It's about electromagnetism, the law of how atoms and light interact, which explains everything from why you don't fall through the floor to why the sky is blue.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/h3YXz71

Truly chiral phonons observed in three-dimensional materials for the first time

Chirality is the breaking of reflection and inversion symmetries. Simply put, it is when an object's mirror images cannot be superimposed over each other. A common example are your two hands—while mirror images of each other, they can never overlap. Chirality appears at all levels in nature and is ubiquitous.

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

Physical theory describes movements of micro-hairs

They are only very simple structures, but without them we could not survive: Countless tiny hairs (cilia) are found on the outer wall of some cells, for example in our lungs or in our brain. When these micrometer-sized hairs coordinate their movement and produce wave-like movements together, they can cause currents on a microscale and thus pump fluid from one place to another. Paramecia—unicellular organisms with numerous cilia—also use such effects to move around.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/HNU4pZE

First 'Run 3' physics result from the Large Hadron Collider's compact muon solenoid

On July 5, the LHC roared to life for its third run after three years of continual improvements to the machine as well as to the experiments' detectors and analysis tools, and immediately reached a record energy of 13.6 TeV. Just three weeks later, the compact muon solenoid (CMS) collaboration was ready for its physics data-taking period.

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

Exploring the surface melting of colloidal glass

In 1842, the famous British researcher Michael Faraday made an amazing observation by chance: A thin layer of water forms on the surface of ice, even though it is well below zero degrees. The temperature is below the melting point of ice, yet the surface of the ice has melted. This liquid layer on ice crystals is also why snowballs stick together.

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

Information carrying could be improved through hopfions

The knot theory originates in Lord Kevin's model proposed in 1867 that atoms are made of vortex rings or knots. Although the hypothesis was proved incorrect, the knot theory has since then proliferated in both mathematics and physics. One peculiar category of knots—the torus knots—are disjointed and linked closed loops, nesting to construct complete ring tori. Physicists find the torus knot a suitable candidate for building hopfions—three-dimensional (3D) topological states that resemble particle-like objects.

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

Physicists shed new light on unanswered questions about glass-liquid transition

Glasses are peculiar materials exhibiting excellent and well-known properties, but also some phenomena that are still not fully understood, even though they have been studied for more than a century. In particular, researchers have not yet reached a complete description of the glass formation process, upon cooling a liquid, and the converse transition of glass to a more stable state—called supercooled liquid—when it is heated up.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/pDgfUI7

Despite conflict Russia sends France giant magnet for nuclear fusion project

Russia on Tuesday dispatched one of six giant magnets needed for the ITER nuclear fusion program in France, one of the last international scientific projects Moscow participates in despite the Ukraine conflict.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/qbI7KCc

Researchers collaborate to better understand the weak nuclear force

The weak nuclear force is currently not entirely understood, despite being one of the four fundamental forces of nature. In a pair of Physical Review Letters articles, a multi-institutional team, including theorists and experimentalists from Louisiana State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and other institutions worked closely together to test physics beyond the "Standard Model" through high-precision measurements of nuclear beta decay.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/TvpiJh6

Capturing and analyzing subtle combination tones produced by violins

When two musical notes are played simultaneously, the human ear can perceive weak additional tones called combination tones. These subjective tones result from the nonlinearity of the inner ear and are attributed to the amplification mechanism of the cochlea. Subjective tones are perceived with different intensities by different individuals. While less perceivable, objective combination tones are also generated by some musical instruments. Because these tones are present in the air, they can be detected by sensitive microphones, measured, and recorded.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/vpFdC8r

As dense as it gets: New model for matter in neutron star collisions

With the exception of black holes, neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe. As their name suggests, neutron stars are mainly made of neutrons. However, our knowledge about the matter produced during the collision of two neutron stars is still limited. Scientists from Goethe University Frankfurt and the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics in Pohang have developed a model that gives insights about matter under such extreme conditions.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/8sWT4h2