IOP is a force for physics at NI Science Festival

A conversation between professors Jim Al-Khalili and Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a lecture on quantum biology by Al-Khalili and a digital creativity workshop were among the sessions offered by the IOP in Ireland at the NI Science Festival.

IOP is a force for physics at NI Science Festival
The festival ran across more than 25 venues in Northern Ireland from 18 February with events including talks, debates, theatre, music, film and interactive sessions offered by a range of organisations, and finished on 26 February.

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Atoms mimic each other, QCD cracks five loops, metamaterial bricks shape sound

Masters of disguise: Herschel Rabitz, Renan Cabrera, Andre Campos and Denys Bondar

How atoms can impersonate each other

An atom could be made to emit an optical signal that is usually associated with another type of atom, according to calculations done by Andre Campos, Denys Bondar, Herschel Rabitz and Renan Cabrera at Princeton University in the US. When an atom is illuminated with light it can absorb energy and give off light at a set of frequencies distinct to that type of atom – which forms the basis of optical spectroscopy. However, if the atom is illuminated by an intense and complex optical signal it should be possible – in principle – to control the quantum states of the

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New graphene-like material could have a band gap

Filling a gap: could h-BCN be used to make better electronics?

A new 2D material just one atom thick has been made by an international team of researchers led by Axel Enders. Dubbed hexangonal boron–carbon–nitrogen (h-BCN), the material could offer many of the benefits of graphene, which is a hexagonal lattice made of just carbon. But unlike graphene, h-BCN has a direct electronic band gap, which could make it useful for creating electronic devices.
First isolated in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who shared

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Has the Large Hadron Collider Disproved the Existence of Ghosts?

An illustration of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, in Switzerland

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might be the world's most incredible science experiment. A particle collider seventeen miles in circumference, it accelerates protons to velocities approaching the speed of light and slams them together. Enthralled scientists from all over the world watch the subatomic demolition derby and record what happens. Thus far, they've witnessed the creation of quark-gluon plasma (the densest matter outside of black holes), found key evidence against

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Table Tennis Gets 'First' Robotic Coach

The robot, called FORPHEUS, was named the "first robot table tennis tutor" for its ability to play and teach the sport.

If you're interested in learning how to play table tennis, a robot in Japan is up for the coaching job, and the bot has even earned a Guinness World Record for its tutoring skills.

The robot, called FORPHEUS, was named the "first robot table tennis tutor" for its ability to play and teach the sport. Guinness World Record officials said the robot's "unique technological intelligence and educational capabilities" earned it the title. The record-breaking robot uses vision and motion sensors to track a match, with cameras following the ball 80 times per second.

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Could a Spacecraft Fly to the Sun?

Humans have sent spacecraft to the moon, the red planet Mars and even distant interstellar space, but could we send a spaceship to the scorching sun?

The answer is yes, and it's happening soon.

In 2018, NASA plans to launch the Solar Probe Plus mission to the sun. Earth is about 93 million miles (149 million kilometers) from the sun, and Solar Probe Plus is slated to get within 4 million miles (6 million km) of the blazing star. [What Will Happen to Earth When the Sun Dies?]

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Type 2 diabetes prevented in 80 per cent of at-risk patients thanks to repurposed drug

A weight loss drug has reduced the risk of type 2 diabetes by 80 per cent compared to placebo.

The drug, which increases the amount of appetite-supressing hormones produced by the gut, was tested on overweight people with 'prediabetes'. This is also known as 'borderline diabetes,' and is characterised by slightly increased blood sugar levels. The condition often leads to type 2 diabetes when untreated.

Prediabetes affects one in ten people in the UK, and progresses into diabetes in 5-10 per cent of patients within ten years. Prediabetes is curable with exercise and

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Bright gamma-ray sources spotted at centre of Andromeda

Most gamma rays emanating from the Andromeda galaxy come from its centre, rather than throughout the galaxy, as previously expected. That is the conclusion of astronomers who have used NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to study Andromeda, which at 2.5 million light-years distance is the nearest major galaxy to Earth. The result is reminiscent of the previous – and unexpected – observation by Fermi that there is an excess of gamma rays coming from the centre of the Milky Way. The astronomers have proposed

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Photons are a drag on the Sun

Sunlight is slowing the rotation of the Sun’s outermost layers by stealing its angular momentum. That is the claim of researchers in the US and Brazil who have studied acoustic waves oscillating through the Sun’s visible surface – the photosphere – to determine how fast the Sun spins at certain depths.
It has been known since the 1980s that the outer 5% of the photosphere rotates more slowly than deeper layers. However, solar physicists do not understand why this slowdown occurs, its total extent and its effect on the Sun’s magnetic dynamo and solar wind.
To solve this puzzle a team led by Ian Cunnyngham and Jeff Kuhn of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii has observed acoustic waves at the limb (edge) of the Sun’s disc using the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which orbits Earth.

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UK self-driving car insurance rules outlined by government

Insurance companies will need to offer two types of protection for self-driving cars in the UK, to cover times when the vehicle is driving itself and times when a human driver is in control, according to government proposals.

The plans, which are detailed in the Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill, enable drivers involved in an accident to claim compensation if the incident took place when their car was driving autonomously.

Under the rules, insurers would be able to try to recover their costs from the vehicle manufacturers.

However, the draft bill also flags up two exemptions.

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Semiconductor memory stores spins

Physicists in the US and the UK have found a way to store and read data in nuclear spins using electronic pulses. The breakthrough could help in the development of spintronic systems that process information using spins – and could also find applications in quantum computation.
Spintronics is an emerging area of solid-state physics that attempts to use the spin as well as the charge of electrons to process data more efficiently. But a problem with electron spins is that they have a fairly short lifetime, which in practice would lead to corrupt data. For this reason scientists have been looking for new and better ways to store and retrieve information from spin systems.
One place to store spin-based information is in nitrogen-

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Optical clocks hit the road

Two independent groups of physicists in Germany and China have built portable optical clocks that are more accurate than the best caesium devices. They say that their instruments could be used to compare the timekeeping of different optical clocks distributed across the globe, and so take us closer to an overhaul of the SI definition of the second. They also reckon their compact clocks could be used by geodesists to determine the height difference between two widely spaced points on the Earth's surface.
All atomic clocks rely on counting the oscillations of an electromagnetic wave with a frequency that is locked to that of a known atomic transition. Traditional atomic clocks use a microwave transition in caesium-133 to fix the output of a crystal oscillator, whereas optical clocks use much higher optical frequencies generated when a monochromatic laser beam interacts with various species of trapped ions or with clouds of cold atoms. These clocks now have accuracies and stabilities that are nearly two orders of magnitude higher than those of the best caesium devices – at levels of a few parts in 1018 rather than 1 part in 1016.

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Nanoparticles give super-resolution microscopy a boost

                                                 Tiny and blue: STED image of UCNPs

A new way of beating the diffraction limit in optical microscopy has been unveiled by physicists in Australia and China. The technique makes use of nanoparticles to improve the efficiency of stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, allowing it to be used with lower levels of illumination than previously possible.
STED microscopy was developed by the Germany-based physicist Stefan Hell, who won one third of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on the technique. The technique allows features much smaller than the wavelength of light to be observed with a microscope – something that is impossible with conventional microscopes.

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Seven Earth-like exoplanets orbit nearby star

The largest known system of Earth-like exoplanets has been found orbiting a dwarf star in the Milky Way. At least three of the seven rocky exoplanets could have oceans of water, making it possible that the system could harbour life. The discovery lends weight to the growing belief among some astronomers that our galaxy could be teeming with Earth-like worlds.
The first exoplanet – a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun – was discovered 25 years ago, and since then, astronomers have identified thousands of such objects. Most are Jupiter-like gas giants because huge exoplanets are much easier to detect than smaller Earth-like worlds. However, improved techniques and new telescopes have led to the discovery of Earth-like exoplanets with the potential to harbour life.

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Liquid drops explode, developing world scientists honoured, star breaks X-ray emission record

Alcohol driven: a drop explodes into thousands of droplets

Drops of a water–alcohol mixture exploding into millions of tiny droplets have been observed by Etienne Reyssat and colleagues at the Institute of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris. The explosions occur when the liquid is placed on a layer of oil and the physicists say that the process is driven by a combination of evaporation, surface tension and fluid flow. The relative concentrations of water and alcohol in the mixture determine the surface tension of the fluid – the more water, the greater the surface tension. When a high-alcohol mixture is placed on an oily surface, it will spread out to create a film, whereas a high-water mixture will form drops.

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