One might think that the optical tweezer – a focused laser beam that can trap small particles – is old hat by now. After all, the tweezer was invented by Arthur Ashkin in 1970. And he received the Nobel Prize for it this year—presumably after its main implications had been realiz … | Continue reading
When Michal Vadai's experiment worked for the first time, she jumped out of her seat. | Continue reading
Relationships for couples often improve when fathers take parental leave during the first nine months of a child's life, says a new study from Ball State University. | Continue reading
As the 2018 midterms proceed, there are still significant risks to the integrity of the voting system – and information warfare continues to try to influence the American public's choices when they cast their ballots. | Continue reading
It's about speed, and Sandia National Laboratories, with a hypersonic wind tunnel and advanced laser diagnostic technology, is in an excellent position to help U.S. defense agencies understand the physics associated with aircraft flying five times the speed of sound. | Continue reading
Viscoelastic fluids are everywhere, whether racing through your veins or through 1,300 kilometers of pipe in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Unlike Newtonian fluids, such as oil or water, viscoelastic fluids stretch like a sticky strand of saliva. Chains of molecules inside the fluids … | Continue reading
Hematite and other transition metal oxides are used in the renewable production of hydrogen. Researchers at the TU Darmstadt have discovered why the materials reached their limits doing so. Their results have now been published in Nature Communications. | Continue reading
Layered transition metal dichalcogenides or TMDCs—materials composed of metal nanolayers sandwiched between two other layers of chalcogens— have become extremely attractive to the research community due to their ability to exfoliate into 2-D single layers. Similar to graphene, th … | Continue reading
A closer look at materials that make up conventional solar cells reveals a nearly rigid arrangement of atoms with little movement. But in hybrid perovskites, a promising class of solar cell materials, the arrangements are more flexible and atoms dance wildly around, an effect tha … | Continue reading
This week, to coincide with the fifteenth annual European Space Weather Week, ESA is celebrating the dynamic phenomenon of space weather. | Continue reading
Once upon a time, a group of disheartened scientists found their tearoom bereft of teaspoons. Despite dispatching a research assistant to go purchase more – so sugar could be stirred and coffee dispensed – the newly purchased teaspoons disappeared within a few short months. | Continue reading
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has rejected a request to appear before an international parliamentary committee delving into the questions around fake news. | Continue reading
Netflix said Wednesday it will produce more series in Europe in languages other than English following the global success of Spanish crime caper "Money Heist" and German mystery "Dark". | Continue reading
A new survey suggests the digital technologies sweeping through the corporate world could mean some job losses at big companies, but it's unclear what impact they will have on consumer prices. | Continue reading
Russian researchers from Prokhorov General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (GPI RAS) and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have developed the world's first ultrasensitive method for rapid detection of small molecules. This method detects t … | Continue reading
Typically, navigation systems for autonomous cars use visible light to identify foreign objects. This works most of the time. But in misty, foggy, or rainy conditions, self-driving cars become a deer in headlights, largely unaware of upcoming obstacles. Scattered light confuses t … | Continue reading
Ian N. Williams is a research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where he is principal investigator in a program called Land-Atmosphere Coupling and Convection in the Water Cycle. | Continue reading
A team of researchers from the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Harvard University, the University of Exeter and the University of California has come up with a new theory to explain the short stature of pygmies living in the jungle. In their paper published in Proceedin … | Continue reading
Talk about space junk. | Continue reading
An international team of researchers has found genetic evidence of northern and southern white rhinoceros' intermingling during the last ice age. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes their study and their hopes that the new informati … | Continue reading
Falling transit ridership across big North American cities has raised concern that Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing services may be leeching passengers. | Continue reading
The sun, like all stars, was born in a giant cold cloud of molecular gas and dust. It may have had dozens or even hundreds of stellar siblings – a star cluster – but these early companions are now scattered throughout our Milky Way galaxy. Although the remnants of this particular … | Continue reading
Older employees may be prematurely exiting the workforce because they feel stereotyped on the basis of their age. | Continue reading
Faced with soaring demand for water as well as the impact of climate change, the lower Kafue river's has reached its maximum water allocation and urgent action is needed to ensure a sustainable future for the river and all the communities and companies that depend on it, says a n … | Continue reading
Places with more diversity in types of housing are more stable and can weather a housing crisis better, say University of Illinois researchers. | Continue reading
Steps must be taken to promote gender equality to ensure more women view history as an academic option and profession, according to a new report published by the Royal Historical Society (RHS) and co-authored by academics at UCL. | Continue reading
The invasive African big-headed ant (Pheidole megacephala) was found on Lord Howe Island in 2003 following complaints from residents about large numbers of ants in buildings. | Continue reading
Scientists are spinning out the secrets of one of nature's most intriguing and potentially valuable materials—spider silk. | Continue reading
Work that previously could have taken chemists months can now be done in minutes. | Continue reading
An international team of scientists from Leicester, Yale, Oxford and London has discovered a rare and exceptionally well-preserved tiny crustacean in 430 million-years-old rocks in Herefordshire, UK. The fossil is a new species of ostracod, a relative of crabs and shrimps and is … | Continue reading
In their latest feat of engineering, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have taken an ordinary white button mushroom from a grocery store and made it bionic, supercharging it with 3-D-printed clusters of cyanobacteria that generate electricity and swirls of graphene n … | Continue reading
No matter if it's grandma's cookies or commercially produced rolls, pastry lovers expect their baked goods to have a certain "golden brown" allure—but only after baking. A white dough that changes hue during storage, however, can negatively affect the appearance and perception of … | Continue reading
Despite humankind's scientific prowess there are still many phenomena that defy explanation or a common agreement on why something happens. A 'glory' is a rare optical phenomenon that is mostly seen by pilots and mountain climbers looking down at mists or clouds. Forming a miniat … | Continue reading
On October 7, 2018, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) shot this photograph while orbiting at an altitude of more than 250 miles over Australia. | Continue reading
When Stony Brook University anthropologist James Rossie began sifting through sediment in the Tugen Hills of Kenya during his first day of the dig, he didn't know he'd discover teeth from a previously undiscovered tiny ape species. | Continue reading
With energy demands rising, researchers at Penn State Behrend and the University of Tabriz, Iran, have completed an algorithm—or approach—to design more efficient wind farms, helping to generate more revenue for builders and more renewable energy for their customers. | Continue reading
If you've ever taken part in the armchair sport of fantasy football and found yourself at the top of your league's standings at the end of the season, a new MIT study suggests your performance—however far removed from any actual playing field—was likely based on skill rather than … | Continue reading
A research team from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and from South Africa has analysed two enzymes with identical substrate binding pockets that nevertheless convert different substrates. In the process, it emerged that changes to the enzyme surface affect its substrate specificit … | Continue reading
An international scientific team, which included scientists from China, Israel, England and Russia, has developed a new method for measuring the response of crystals on the electric field. The study, performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), were published … | Continue reading
A team of scientists has created the world's most powerful electromagnetic pulses in the terahertz range to control in fine detail how a data-storage material switches physical form. This discovery could contribute to scaled-down memory devices, eventually revolutionizing how com … | Continue reading
Researchers at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) have partnered with a team from Tencent Machine Learning to create a new technique for training artificial intelligence (AI) machines faster than ever before while maintaining accuracy. | Continue reading
How do you imagine the interior of our cells? Often compared to tiny factories, cells found smart and sophisticated ways to organize their interiors. Most biological processes require cells to bring together structures such as proteins and nucleic acids (like DNA) at the right ti … | Continue reading
Epigenetic changes often play an important role in cancer, because they cause the genetic material to be read incorrectly at certain locations. Genes that are especially critical are those that control the growth and death of cells. Scientists at Helmholtz Zentrum München have no … | Continue reading
Vestas, the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer, said Wednesday its order book had reached an all-time high, but falling prices took the gust out of the company's sales figures. | Continue reading