Flash Physics: Intricate crystals made with DNA, laser harnesses Josephson effect, borophene has Dirac cones

Golden design: DNA glues gold nanoparticles into clathrate crystals structure

The most complex synthetic nanoparticle crystal ever made has been created using DNA and gold. Researchers have used gold nanoparticles and DNA "smart glue" to assemble intricate clathrate-crystal structures. There are many aspects of nature that scientists struggle to emulate in a laboratory. This includes a huge array of complex crystal structures such as clathrates. These cage-like lattices comprise polyhedral clusters and pores that can house small molecules. Such structures are useful for environmental applications where pollutants can be held within the pores.

Read more »

Flash Physics: Too radioactive even for robots, IBM to build 50 qubit computer, seeing through opaque materials

Failing robots: radiation levels inside Fukushima units too high even for robots

Better robots are needed for investigating the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after current designs failed due to radiation levels and debris obstacles. At a recent news conference, president of Fukushima Daiichi decommissioning, Naohiro Masuda, spoke about the need for more creative robot design after repeated failures. In 2011, multiple reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant went into meltdown after a severe earthquake and tsunami. To safely decommission the damaged plant, its operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) must know exactly where the melted fuel is and the extent of structural damage to the surrounding buildings. The radiation levels, however, would kill a human within seconds, so TEPCO is reliant upon remote-controlled robotic probes. Yet early robots have come across unexpected challenges. In February, TEPCO sent in two

Read more »

Meet the 'angulon', a new quasiparticle found in superfluid helium

Molecule traps: angulons spotted in helium droplets

The quasiparticle concept allows physicists to describe complex, many-body interactions in terms of the behaviour of a single particle-like entity. Usually these particles turn up in condensed-matter systems such as semiconductors, but a new type of quasiparticle known as an angulon has been proposed to describe the rotation of an atomic or molecular impurity within a solvent. First proposed theoretically two years ago, angulons have now been shown to explain the curious behaviour of a range of different molecules rotating within liquid helium.

Read more »

Physics: Lensing study backs cold dark matter, cancer detected by Raman spectroscopy, black-hole burbs

New gravitational lensing study backs cold dark matter

Cold and dark: map of dark matter in one of the galaxy clusters

A new high-resolution map of dark matter – an invisible substance that appears to have a profound gravitational effect on galaxies and other large-scale structures in the cosmos – has been produced by an international team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope. The map focuses on three galaxy clusters that act as cosmic telescopes by magnifying images of the more distant universe through gravitational lensing. The degree to which this magnification occurs gives an extremely precise measurement of the dark matter within the clusters. "We have mapped all of the clumps of dark matter that the data permit us to detect, and have produced the most detailed topological map of the dark-matter landscape to date," explains Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University in the US,

Read more »

Insects inspire water-repellent material

Surfaces inspired by cicada wings and mosquito eyes have antifogging properties. A team of scientists from France and the US has created surfaces that mimic these natural systems, in an attempt to replicate their anti-fogging mechanisms.
When water comes into contact with a surface, its behaviour can vary from beading into tiny droplets to spreading evenly over the surface. For water-loving, hydrophilic materials, the droplet will spread out and maximize contact with the surface. In contrast, for water-repelling, hydrophobic materials, the water forms beads. This behaviour is due to the angle between the droplet's edge and the surface directly underneath – known as the contact angle. When the contact angle is more than 90°, the surface is considered hydrophobic. If it is higher than 160°,

Read more »

Earth’s mantle may be hotter than thought

HOT STUFF  Temperatures in Earth’s mantle are higher than previously thought, results from a new experiment suggest.

Temperatures across Earth’s mantle are about 60 degrees Celsius higher than previously thought, a new experiment suggests. Such toasty temperatures would make the mantle runnier than earlier research suggested, a development that could help explain the details of how tectonic plates glide on top of the mantle, geophysicists report in the March 3 Science.

“Scientists have been arguing over the mantle temperature for decades,” says study coauthor Emily Sarafian, a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and at MIT. “Scientists will argue over 10 degree changes, so changing it by 60 degrees is

Read more »

Oldest microfossils suggest life thrived on Earth about 4 billion years ago

Tiny, iron-rich fossils exhumed from the depths of an ancient ocean could reveal the cradle of life.

These micrometer-scale structures are probably remnants of microorganisms that once lived amidst ancient hydrothermal vents, researchers suggest March 1 in Nature.

“In a nutshell, what we’ve found are the oldest microfossils on Earth,” says study coauthor Matthew Dodd, a biogeochemist at University College London. The rocks that hold the fossils came from Quebec and date to somewhere between 4.28 billion and 3.77 billion years old — when Earth was still a baby. The next oldest microfossils reported are just under 3.5 billion years

Read more »

FLASH; Frogs see colour at night, new lens sharpens X-rays, PICO-60 puts new limits on dark-matter

    Amphibians have colourful night-time vision

Froggy vision: behavioural tests show amphibians see colour in the dark

Frogs and toads can see colour when it is too dark for humans to see. Many animals have evolved to have impressive visual skills, yet understanding how and what they see has always been a challenge for scientists. A group from Lund University in Sweden and the University of Helsinki in Finland has therefore used behavioural studies to investigate the vision of frogs. Human eyes contain two types of visual cells in the retina – cones and rods. The cones allow us to see colour, but they stop working at night because they require a lot of light. At this point the rods take over and enable us to see in black and white under low-light conditions. Although this is the case for most vertebrates, frogs and toads are unique in that they have two spectrally different kinds of

Read more »

Flash Physics: Flower acts as supercapacitor, ORNL head steps down, triboelectricity boosts mass spectrometer

Flower doubles as supercapacitor

Flower power: the rose supercapacitor

Two years ago, researchers at Linköping University in Sweden showed that a rose can form the basis of a transistor. Now team member Roger Gabrielsson and colleagues have used a similar flower to create a supercapacitor that can store a large amount of electrical energy. The team put a cut rose into a polymer solution, which was absorbed by the flower. The material polymerizes spontaneously within the stem, leaves and petals of the flower to create long threads that conduct electricity. This allows a large amount of electrical change to be pumped into the flower. "We have been able to charge the rose repeatedly, for hundreds of times without any loss

Read more »

Climate-friendly aircraft routing could cut environmental damage

Changing direction: rerouting could reduce environmental impact caption

Rerouting transatlantic flights to follow the most climate-friendly path could damage the climate 10% less for an increase in costs of just 1%. That's according to a team from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and the UK.

"An attractive aspect of our approach is that it potentially enables some mitigation of aviation's climate impact...using the current aircraft fleet," Volker Grewe of the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Germany, and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, explains. "Some mitigation options involve changes in aircraft or engine design, which would take decades to implement given the slow – and expensive – turnover of the global fleet."

Read more »

Supernova 1987A enters a new phase

Moving on: SN 1987A is entering a new era

Thirty years after it exploded, supernova SN 1987A is starting a new phase in its development as the shock wave from the stellar explosion is finally passing beyond a ring of gas encircling the dead star.

On 23 February 1987, a blue supergiant star named Sanduleak –69° 202 exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a dwarf-galaxy neighbour to the Milky Way 169,000 light-years away. Named SN 1987A, it was the first supernova since 1604 to be visible to the naked eye.

Robert Kirshner, an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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

Read more »

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

Read more »

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?]

Read more »

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

Read more »

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

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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-

Read more »

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.

Read more »