feed info

72 articles from PhysOrg

Dissecting colloidal glasses using laser as a lancet

Bo Li and Kai Kou, Research Fellows of IBS Center for Soft and Living Matter, together with Walter Kob, Professor of University of Montpellier and Institute Universitaire de France, and Steve Granick, Director of the IBS Center for Soft and Living Matter, report together in Nature that the onset of glass transition is a highly non-trivial process involving complex non-linear responses.

Studies detail impact of mammal species decline in Neotropics

Mammal defaunation—the loss of mammals to extinction, extirpation and population decline—in the Neotropics and its adverse effects is the focus for two scientific papers produced recently by a group of scientists led by Juliano André Bogoni, an ecologist at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil. The Neotropical realm extends south from the Mexican desert into South America as far as...

How organ functions were shaped over the course of evolution

A large-scale study conducted by molecular biologists from Heidelberg University has yielded groundbreaking new insights into the evolution and regulation of gene expression in mammalian organs. The scientists investigated RNA synthesis and subsequent protein synthesis in the organs of humans and other representative mammals, and with the aid of sequencing technologies, they analyzed more than 100...

Late-season Arctic research cruise reveals warm ocean temperatures, active ecosystem

Arctic researchers Jacqueline Grebmeier and Lee Cooper have been visiting the Bering and Chukchi seas off Alaska for nearly 30 years, collecting information about the biological diversity of the watery world under the sea ice to understand how marine ecosystems are responding to environmental changes. This year, a late-season research cruise in October revealed a surprise. At a time of year when...

Turning heat into power with efficient organic thermoelectric material

Thermoelectric materials can turn a temperature difference into electricity. Organic thermoelectric materials could be used to power wearable electronics or sensors; however, the power output is still very low. An international team led by Jan Anton Koster, Professor of Semiconductor Physics at the University of Groningen, has now produced an n-type organic semiconductor with superior properties...

Electrochemical oxygen evolution on Hf2B2Ir5 electrode material

Water electrolysis is an electrochemical way for production of hydrogen, which is considered as one of the future energy carrier molecules. Therefore, looking at numerous advantages of proton exchange membrane electrolysis compared to the classical alkaline variant, it's efficiency and applicability on the large scale is of huge importance nowadays. However, the slow kinetics of the anode oxygen...

First sightings of lek and courtship behavior in wrinkle-faced bats

Wrinkle-faced bats not only have the most convoluted faces of any bat species, the males also have a flap of furry white skin they can pull over their lower faces, not unlike the face masks people wear. In a new report published in PLOS ONE, Smithsonian researchers and colleagues describe the first observations of courtship in this species.

Researchers demonstrate attosecond boost for electron microscopy

A team of physicists from the University of Konstanz and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany have achieved attosecond time resolution in a transmission electron microscope by combining it with a continuous-wave laser—offering new insights into light-matter interactions.

The persistent problem of 1,4-dioxane in water

Of the many chemicals that can pollute the world's water supplies, 1,4-dioxane is one of the most persistent. Listed as a likely carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 1,4-dioxane is largely unregulated and difficult to remove from water. A new article in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, explores the challenges of...

Climate-adapted plant breeding

The famous seed vault in Spitsbergen and national gene banks retain hundreds of thousands of seed samples to preserve old varieties of crop plants and the genetic diversity associated with them. Are these seed banks gold mines or seed cemeteries?

Cloth face masks that can be disinfected by sunlight

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have become accustomed to wearing cotton face masks in public places. However, viruses and bacteria that stick to the mask could be transferred elsewhere when the wearer removes or touches it. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed a special type of cotton face mask that kills up to 99.9999% of bacteria and viruses...

Connecting two classes of unconventional superconductors

The understanding of unconventional superconductivity is one of the most challenging and fascinating tasks of solid-state physics. Different classes of unconventional superconductors share that superconductivity emerges near a magnetic phase despite that the underlying physics is different. Two of these unconventional materials are the heavy-fermion and the iron-based superconductors.

Identifying the microscopic mechanism of vibrational energy harvesters

A Japanese research team elucidated the microscopic mechanism in which amorphous silica becomes negatively charged as a vibrational energy harvester, which is anticipated to achieve self-power generation without charging, as it is needed for IoT that is garnering attention in recent years with its 'trillion sensors' that create a large-scale network of sensors. Unlike wind power and solar power...

Observation of four-charm-quark structure

The strong interaction is one of the fundamental forces of nature, which binds quarks into hadrons such as the proton and the neutron, the building blocks of atoms. According to the quark model, hadrons can be formed by two or three quarks, called mesons and baryons respectively, and collectively referred to as conventional hadrons. The quark model also allows for the existence of so-called exotic...