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72 articles from PhysOrg

Studies explore fluids in pancakes, beer, and the kitchen sink

Mechanical engineer Roberto Zenit spent the summer of 2019 trying to solve a problem that now plagues science departments around the world: How can hands-on fluid dynamics experiments, usually carried out in well-stocked lab rooms, be moved off campus? Since the pandemic hit, leading researchers like Zenit have found creative ways for students to explore flow at home.

Researchers record largest aggregation of fishes in abyssal deep sea

The largest aggregation of fishes ever recorded in the abyssal deep sea was discovered by a team of oceanographers from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UH, U.S.), Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI, U.S.) and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC, UK). Their findings were published recently in Deep-Sea Research.

Flow physics could help forecasters predict extreme events

About 1,000 tornadoes strike the United States each year, causing billions of dollars in damage and killing about 60 people on average. Tracking data show that they're becoming increasingly common in the southeast, and less frequent in "Tornado Alley," which stretches across the Great Plains. Scientists lack a clear understanding of how tornadoes form, but a more urgent challenge is to develop...

Nature's toolkit for killing viruses and bacteria

They burst out of toilet bubbles, swim across drinking water, spread through coughs. Tiny infectious microbes—from the virus that causes COVID-19 to waterborne bacteria—kill millions of people around the world each year. Now engineers are studying how zinc oxide surfaces and natural hydrodynamic churning have the power to kill pathogens first.

The secret origins of China's 40-year plan to end carbon emissions

The biggest emitter of planet-warming pollution managed to take almost the whole world by surprise. In a September speech to the United Nations, Chinese President Xi Jinping put a 2060 end date on his country's contribution to global warming. No other nation can do more to keep warming below the 1.5C threshold set in the Paris Agreement. Yet diplomats, climate activists and even policy experts...

China launches mission to bring back material from moon

China launched an ambitious mission on Tuesday to bring back rocks and debris from the moon's surface for the first time in more than 40 years—an undertaking that could boost human understanding of the moon and of the solar system more generally.

Creating self-constructed folded macrocycles with low symmetry

The synthesis and self-organization of biological macromolecules is essential for life on earth. Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich chemists now report the spontaneous emergence of complex ring-shaped macromolecules with low degrees of symmetry in the laboratory.

Carbon nanocomposites are now one step closer to practical industrial

A research team from the Center for Design, Manufacturing and Materials at Skoltech has recently published a study focusing on multifunctional materials created through the addition of carbon nanoparticles to polymer matrices, designed to allow self-diagnostic monitoring through an inexpensive technique.

Vibrational encounters—phonon polaritons meet molecules

Researchers from CIC nanoGUNE BRTA (San Sebastian, Spain), in collaboration with the Donostia International Physics Center (San Sebastián, Spain) and the University of Oviedo (Spain) employed a spectroscopic nanoimaging technique to study how infrared nanolight—in the form of phonon polaritons—and molecular vibrations interact with each other.

Researchers debut superfast exoplanet camera

In the years since astronomers discovered the first exoplanet—a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system—more than 4,000 have been observed. Usually, their presence is given away by the slight effects they have on their parent stars, which vastly outshine them. For a decade and half, scientists have been trying to image exoplanets directly, but the Earth's atmosphere presents a major...

Scientists characterize second known minimoon

Astronomers using data collected with the Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT) have helped to characterize only the second known minimoon of Earth, a newly discovered asteroid with the designation 2020 CD3, or CD3 for short. The LDT observations helped to clarify both the rotation rate and the orbit of this diminutive body, the latter of which helped prove that CD3 is a natural body and not some relic...

A planet-forming disk still fed by the mother cloud

Stellar systems like our own form inside interstellar clouds of gas and dust that collapse producing young stars surrounded by protoplanetary disks. Planets form within these protoplanetary disks, leaving clear gaps, which have been recently observed in evolved systems, at the time when the mother cloud has been cleared out. ALMA has now revealed an evolved protoplanetary disk with a large gap...

Nature is widely adapted to current climate—making it harder to adjust to a new one

To do the right thing at the right time, organisms need to glean cues from their environment. With ongoing climate change, the timing of these cues, like the accumulation of warm days, is rapidly shifting. Now a network of researchers working on an unprecedentedly large dataset of seasonal events has shown that the timing of species' activity fail to keep up with their cues, and that how quickly...

New clues shed light on importance of Earth's ice sheets

Researchers examining subglacial waters both from Antarctica and Greenland found that these waters have higher concentrations of important, life-sustaining elements than previously thought, answering a big unknown for scientists seeking to understand the Earth's geochemical processes.

Siberian primrose has not had time to adapt to climate change

Siberian primrose, a species protected under the Habitats Directive of the European Union, spread northward from southern areas to the current Bothnian Bay as well as, through another route, to northern Norway with the gradually receding ice after the Ice Age. Compared to today, the warming of the climate was very slow at the time.

A new beat in quantum matter

Oscillatory behaviors are ubiquitous in nature, ranging from the orbits of planets to the periodic motion of a swing. In pure crystalline systems, presenting a perfect spatially-periodic structure, the fundamental laws of quantum physics predict a remarkable and counter-intuitive oscillatory behavior: when subjected to a weak electric force, the electrons in the material do not undergo a net...

Researchers use infrared light to detect molecules

Ordinary solid-state lasers, as used in laser pointers, generate light in the visible range. For many applications, however, such as the detection of molecules, radiation in the mid-infrared range is needed. Such infrared lasers are much more difficult to manufacture, especially if the laser radiation is required in the form of extremely short, intense pulses.

In the Cerrado, topography explains the genetic diversity of amphibians more than land cover

The savanna tree frog Bokermannohyla ibitiguara is about 4 cm long and is found only in gallery forest along streams in the Serra da Canastra mountain range in the state of Minas Gerais, Southeast Brazil. In this watery forest environment, it can grow, feed, mate, and lay eggs without needing to range very far throughout its life cycle, according to a study published in Diversity and...

Researcher zeroes in on critical point for improving superconductors

The search for a superconductor that can work under less extreme conditions than hundreds of degrees below zero or at pressures like those near the center of the Earth is a quest for a revolutionary new power—one that's needed for magnetically levitating cars and ultra-efficient power grids of the future.