Physics

Physicists Discover Inorganic Dust Has Surprisingly Life-Like Qualities

Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? Intriguing new evidence of life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space are revealed today in the New Journal of Physics. The findings hint at the ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 17 2007 - 7:23pm

Preparing For Future Nuclear Waste- Actinides Under Investigation

Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are uniting theory, computation and experiment to discover exactly how heavy elements, such as uranium and technetium, interact in their environment. As part of that effort, scientists have combined sen ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 20 2007 - 4:14pm

How Solar Neutrinos Make The Sun's Heart Beat

Scientists conducting an experiment beneath the mountains of Italy have reached a clearer understanding of the sun's heart-- and of a mysterious class of subatomic particles born there. The researchers, working as part of an international collaboratio ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 21 2007 - 8:21am

Physicists Find Formula For Spider-Man Suit

Physicists have found the formula for a Spiderman suit. Recent research determined that van der Waals forces, the weak attraction that molecules have for each other when they are brought very close together, are responsible for the amazing sticking power o ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2007 - 9:17am

Hot Ice Lubricates Artificial Joints

A recent simulation has shown that thin layers of ice could persist on specially treated diamond coatings at temperatures well above body temperature, which could make ice-coated-diamond films an ideal coating for artificial heart valves, joint replacement ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 5 2007 - 12:18pm

Pillar Of Invisibility

While we are a long way off from the lightweight, high-performance, magical cloak of Harry Potter, physicists have been busy designing ways to make invisibility possible. A recent theoretical analysis of a column-shaped invisibility cloak, by a collaborati ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 5 2007 - 10:41am

Ytterbium Atoms Create 'Spooky' Quantum Communication

Physicists at the University of Michigan have coaxed two separate atoms to communicate with a sort of quantum intuition that Albert Einstein called "spooky." In doing so, the researchers have made an advance toward super-fast quantum computing. T ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 6 2007 - 10:42am

Physics Uncovers Secret Of The Tunic Of Saint Francis

The tunic believed to have been worn by Saint Francis of Assisi preserved in the Church of Saint Francis in Cortona (Province of Arezzo) dates back to the period in which the saint lived, whereas the tunic preserved in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2007 - 9:49pm

Sunspot 10926 Is A 'Magnetic Trilobite On The Sun' (Video)

"We've never seen anything quite like it," says solar physicist Lika Guhathakurta from NASA headquarters. Last week she sat in an audience of nearly two hundred colleagues at the "Living with a Star" workshop in Boulder, Colorado, ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 20 2007 - 3:55pm

Making A More Accurate Kilogram

For as many people as seem to like the metric system, few realize that both the motive for its creation (competing with England, much like the calendar the French created, though that did not last) and its inherent accuracy were flawed. The French took a p ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 21 2007 - 11:10am