With the weather looking up, SpaceX and NASA officials vowed Tuesday to keep crew safety the top priority for the nation's first astronaut launch to orbit in nearly a decade.

Electrolysis, passing a current through water to break it into gaseous hydrogen and oxygen, could be a handy way to store excess energy from wind or solar power. The hydrogen can be stored and used as fuel later, when the sun is down or the winds are calm.

Scientists have known for a decade that cells that fuse with others to perform their essential functions—such as muscle cells that join together to make fibers—form long projections that invade the territory of their fusion partners. But how the thin and floppy polymers involved in this process propel mechanically stiff protrusions has been unknown.

Five years after NASA's MAVEN spacecraft entered into orbit around Mars, data from the mission has led to the creation of a map of electric current systems in the Martian atmosphere.

E-learning could be a crucial tool in the biosecurity fight against invasive alien species such as Japanese Knotweed, Zebra Mussels and Signal Crayfish according to a new study published in the academic journal Biological Invasions.

For the first time, scientists have introduced minuscule tracking devices directly into the interior of mammalian cells, giving an unprecedented peek into the processes that govern the beginning of development.

Just as a literature buff might explore a novel for recurring themes, physicists and mathematicians search for repeating structures present throughout nature.

Spring is in full swing. Trees are leafing out, flowers are blooming, bees are buzzing, and birds are singing. But a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that those birds in your backyard may be changing right along with the climate.

Researchers from North Carolina State University and Elon University have made artificial cilia, or hair-like structures, that can bend into new shapes in response to a magnetic field, then return to their original shape when exposed to the proper light source.

Mars is a long way from 221B Baker Street, but one of fiction's best-known detectives will be represented on the Red Planet after NASA's Perseverance rover touches down on Feb. 18, 2021. SHERLOC, an instrument on the end of the rover's robotic arm, will hunt for sand-grain-sized clues in Martian rocks while working in tandem with WATSON, a camera that will take close-up pictures of rock textures....

The 'Cow' is not alone; with the help of W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii, astronomers have discovered two more like it—the 'Koala' and a similar mysterious bright object called CSS161010. This trio of fast blue optical transients (FBOTs) appear to be relatives, all belonging to a highly-luminous family that has a track record for surprising astronomers with their fast, powerful...

Researchers in the US and Korea reported the first efficient flexible light-emitting diodes with a two-dimensional titanium carbide MXene as a flexible and transparent electrode. These MXene-based light-emitting diodes (MX-LED) with high efficiency and flexibility have been achieved via precise interface engineering from the synthesis of the material to the application.

Optical logical operations have sparked major interest in the past decade since they can enable many applications, particularly those involving high-throughput and on-the-fly data processing such as secured wireless communication and autonomous driving. However, the reported optical logic gates rely heavily on the precise control of input light/pump light, including the phase, polarization, and...

Move aside, AT2018COW. There is a new astronomical transient in the universe, and it is faster, heavier and brighter at radio wavelengths than its mysterious predecessors.

Giant planets in our solar system and circling other stars have exotic clouds unlike anything on Earth, and the gas giants orbiting close to their stars—so-called hot Jupiters—boast the most extreme.

Mode-locked fibre lasers generating ultrashort pulses with the advantages of robustness, compactness and excellent beam quality are of tremendous interest in applications such as laser material processing, medicine, precision measurement, biological photonics, ultrafast spectroscopy, optical communication and scientific research. In recent decades, mode-locked ultrafast fibre lasers operating in...

Light carrying photon momentum can push and pull microparticles through momentum exchange. This momentum exchange process generates optical forces, which either attracts (conventional optical tweezers), pushes (radiation force) or pulls (pulling force) microparticles. A new emerging research interest, optical lateral force which represents the optical force perpendicular to the propagating...

Have you seen small birds nervously jumping up and down the branches and calling at a cat in a park? For a long time, scientists have been interested in what type of information about predators is coded in alarm calls; is it predator's species identity? Or their size? Or how dangerous it is? A recent study published in Ethology provides new discoveries in this field.

Atomically thin layers of the semimetal tungsten ditelluride conduct electricity losslessly along narrow, one-dimensional channels at the crystal edges. The material is therefore a second-order topological insulator. By obtaining experimental proof of this behavior, physicists from the University of Basel have expanded the pool of candidate materials for topological superconductivity. The findings...

Dr. Jeong Nam-Jo of the Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER), Marine Energy Convergence and Integration Research Team developed synthesis technologies for an electrode material that can directly synthesize molybdenum disulfide thin films on the electrode current collector surface to contribute to improving the efficiency and economic feasibility of salt gradient power generation using reverse...

Alterations to chromosomes are considered important in speciation (the process by which new species are formed). This is because several chromosomal rearrangements can make the genome of a few individuals in a population so different that they cannot successfully interbreed with the rest of the population. It is believed that, over time, this can lead to the evolution of two distinct species with...

Researchers at the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology at Osaka University used trapped ions to demonstrate the spreading of vibrational quanta as part of a quantum random walk. This work relies on their exquisite control of individual ions using lasers, and can lead to new quantum simulations of biological systems.

Plasmonic metasurfaces are artificial 2-D sheets of plasmonic unit cells repeated in a subwavelength array, which give rise to unexpected wave properties that do not exist in nature. In the linear regime, their applications in wavefront manipulation for lensing, holography or polarization control have been intensively studied. However, applications in the nonlinear regime have been rarely...

The invention of the chirped pulse amplification technique by Strickland and Mourou in 1985 has boosted the peak power of ultrashort laser pulses to an unprecedented level, which have found broad applications in fundamental science, industry and medicine. However, such high power lasers are usually obtained at the near-infrared wavelength of about 0.8 micron. The extension to the mid-infrared band...