Free Republic

Scientists at The University of Manchester have discovered a new class of materials which have previously only existed in science fiction films and books. A team of British and Russian scientists led by Professor Geim have discovered a whole family of previously unknown materials, which are one atom thick and exhibit properties which scientists had never thought possible. Not only are they ultra-thin, but depending on circumstances they can also be ultra-strong, highly-insulating or highly-conductive, offering a wide range of unique properties for space-age engineers and designers to choose from. Professor Andre Geim said: "This discovery opens up practically infinite...

They can theoretically carry charge 1,000 times faster than ordinary electrons. After 85 years of searching, researchers have confirmed the existence of a massless particle called the Weyl fermion for the first time ever. With the unique ability to behave as both matter and anti-matter inside a crystal, this strange particle can create electrons that have no mass. The discovery is huge, not just because we finally have proof that these elusive particles exist, but because it paves the way for far more efficient electronics, and new types of quantum computing. "Weyl fermions could be used to solve the traffic...

Typically when referring to electrical current, an image of electrons moving through a metallic wire is conjured. Using the spin Seebeck effect (SSE), it is possible to create a current of pure spin (a quantum property of electrons related to its magnetic moment) in magnetic insulators. However, this work demonstrates that the SSE is not limited to magnetic insulators but also occurs in a class of materials known as paramagnets. Since magnetic moments within paramagnets do not interact with each other like in conventional ferromagnets, and thus do not hold their magnetization when an external magnetic field is removed, this...

European Space Agency Cluster II satellites observe equatorial noise waves inside the Earth's magnetosphere. Credit: ESA/Yuri Shprits ********************************************************************************************************************************************************** Since the early 1970s, orbiting satellites have picked up on noise-like plasma waves very close to the Earth's magnetic field equator. This "equatorial noise," as it was then named, seemed to be an unruly mess of electric and magnetic fields oscillating at different frequencies in the form of plasma waves. Now a team from MIT, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Sheffield, and elsewhere has detected a remarkably orderly pattern amid the noise. In a region of space...

The number of atoms in this silicon sphere is known given or taken 20 atoms each 10^9. The atom distance was measured by the X-ray interferometer on the left. Credit: Enrico Massa and Carlo Sasso ================================================================================================ An ongoing international effort to redefine the kilogram by 2018 has been helped by recent efforts from a team researchers from Italy, Japan and Germany to correlate two of the most precise measurements of Avogadro's number and obtain one averaged value that can be used for future calculations. Their results are published this week in the Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data. Avogadro's...

An exotic particle made up of five quarks has been discovered a decade after experiments seemed to rule out its existence. The short-lived ‘pentaquark’ was spotted by researchers analysing data on the decay of unstable particles in the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva. The finding, says LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson, opens a new era in physicists’ understanding of the strong nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together. “The pentaquark is not just any new particle — it represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons...

Because perturbation theory doesn’t work, it is very hard to predict the consequences of the strong force. One thing we do know is that the binding energy of the strong force which holds the quarks together inside them is responsible for almost all of the mass of protons and neutrons, and hence almost all of the mass of you. Calculations on supercomputers (such as the DiRAC facility in the UK) use “lattice” methods to make calculations when perturbation theory doesn’t work. These involve approximating the space-time continuum by a lattice of discrete points and events; they are now able to...

Video—What if there was a black hole in your pocket? Could you survive being close to a black hole the size of a nickel? Seriously though, how grisly would your death be and what would such a phenomena mean for the future of the Earth? A new video from the folks at Kurz Gesagt posted July 16 tries to answer those questions with some helpful animations. The video explores a few different assumptions, as the impact of the black hole would depend on whether its size was based on the mass or width of a nickel. Either way, if a...

Ten days after the three-year anniversary of CERN’s discovery of the Higgs boson, researchers on the LHCb experiment at CERN have announced that another discovery has been made: They have found a new exotic class of particles. The team has submitted their findings to the journal Physical Review Letters for reviewal. These particles are called “pentaquarks,” and they offer some interesting insights regarding the nature of, well, nature. Typically, we find that composite particles consist of three quarks. The proton, for example, is composed of three valence quarks: Two up quarks and a down quark. But in 1964, American physicist...

CSIRO's Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope. Credit: CSIRO A wisp of cosmic radio waves, emitted before our solar system was born, shows that a new radio telescope will be able to detect galaxies other telescopes can't. The work, led by Dr James Allison of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, was announced today (6 July) at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, north Wales. The finding was one of the first made with CSIRO's Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a new radio telescope 300 kilometres inland from the Western Australian town of Geraldton. The discovery...

Everything we know, and everything else besides, burst into existence at the Big Bang. Now scientists have concluded that we could be heading for an equally dramatic cosmic finale: the Big Rip. A new theoretical model suggests that as the universe expands, everything, from galaxies, planets and atomic particles to space-time itself, will eventually be torn apart before vanishing from view. There’s no need for immediate alarm, however: the extreme sequence of events is predicted for around 22 billion years from now.

Rice University has installed the Titan Themis scanning/transmission electron microscope, which will enable scientists from Rice as well as academic and industrial partners to view and analyze materials at angstrom-scale (one-tenth of a nanometer) resolution, about the size of a single hydrogen atom. Images will be captured with a variety of detectors, including X-ray, optical and multiple electron detectors and a 4K-resolution camera (will create 4K ultra HD images). The microscope gives researchers the ability to create three-dimensional structural reconstructions and carry out electric field mapping of subnanoscale materials. Electron microscopes use beams of electrons rather than light to illuminate...

Just as leap years keep our calendars lined up with Earth's revolution around the sun, leap seconds adjust for Earth's rotation. This kind of fine-tuning wasn't much of an issue before the invention of atomic clocks, whose ticks are defined by the cycling of atoms. Cesium-based clocks, one kind of atomic clock, measure the passage of time much more precisely than those based on the rotation of our planet, so adding a leap second allows astronomical time to catch up to atomic time. Most of us won't notice the addition, which happens at 23:59:59 coordinated universal time (UTC), or 7:59...

When Henri met Albert the stars didn’t quite align; nor did their clocks. Jimena Canales, historian of science, tells Joe Gelonesi about her discovery of an explosive 20th century debate that changed our view of time and destroyed a reputation.Physicists and philosophers have a curious relationship. They both need each other for the cosmic dance, but one partner sometimes refuses to join in. Star physicist Stephen Hawking even declared the end of philosophy in 2011. In some ways the pronouncement was to be expected; physics triumphalism dictates that at some point philosophy will exhaust itself and be unable to solve...

Cosmic Inflation’s Five Great Predictions A “speculative” theory no more; it’s had four of them confirmed. Image credit: Max Tegmark / Scientific American, by Alfred T. Kamajian. “Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.” -Paul Steinhardt, 2014 When we think about the Big Bang, we typically think about the origin of the Universe: the hot, dense, expanding state where everything came from. By noticing and measuring the fact that the Universe is expanding today — that the galaxies are getting farther apart from one another in all directions — we...

Einstein's theory of time and space will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year. Even today it captures the imagination of scientists. In an international collaboration, researchers from the universities of Vienna, Harvard and Queensland have now discovered that this world-famous theory can explain yet another puzzling phenomenon: the transition from quantum behavior to our classical, everyday world. Their results are published in the journal Nature Physics. In 1915 Albert Einstein formulated the theory of general relativity which fundamentally changed our understanding of gravity. He explained gravity as the manifestation of the curvature of space and time. Einstein's theory predicts that...

The idea is when mass moves or changes, Einstein said that there should be gravitational ripples produced in spacetime. Our problem is that the size and effect of gravitational waves is incredibly small. We need to find the most catastrophic events in the Universe if we hope even detect them. A supernova detonating asymmetrically, or two supermassive black holes orbiting each other, or a Galactus family reunion; are the magnitude of events we’re looking for. The most serious attempt to detect gravitational waves is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO detector, in the United States. It has two facilities...

Sir Isaac Newton...came to the realization that the math that had been used thus far to describe physical motion of massive bodies, simply would not suffice... Newton developed the Calculus in which this way of approaching moving bodies, he was able to accurately model the motion of not only Halley’s comet, but also any other heavenly body that moved across the sky. ... Newton recognized that Kepler’s mathematical equation for planetary motion, Kepler’s 3rd Law ( P2=A3 ), was purely based on empirical observation, and was only meant to measure what we observed within our solar system. Newton’s mathematical brilliance...

The bizarre nature of reality as laid out by quantum theory has survived another test, with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured. Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment, which involves a moving object that is given the choice to act like a particle or a wave. Wheeler's experiment then asks - at which point does the object decide? Common sense says the object is either wave-like or particle-like, independent of how we measure it. But quantum physics predicts that whether you observe...

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a mathematical genius who had his life chronicled in the movie A Beautiful Mind. One of Nash’s colleagues says that just days before he died in a New York taxi cab accident, he had discussed his latest and possibly most brilliant discovery to date. Mathematician Cédric Villan says that Nash told him that he had replaced Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and that the new equation would further explain quantum gravity. The Daily Mail reports that on May 20, 2015, just three days before the tax cab accident that would take his life, Nash spoke to...