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Our understanding of life and technology at extreme temperatures could become clearer thanks to a microfluidic device that studies ice formation. The new instrument studies ice formation in supercooled water George Whitesides, at Harvard University, Cambridge, US, and colleagues have developed a microfluidic device that produces supercooled water drops (droplets that remain liquid below 0 °C) and measures the temperature at which ice nucleates in them. The device is two orders of magnitude faster that current state-of-the-art ice nucleation instruments and very accurate, claims the team.Ice nucleation controls water's freezing process. Studying how water behaves is important for our comprehension...

An Iraqi-born 16-year-old reportedly has cracked a math puzzle that has gone unsolved for over 300 years. Mohamed Altoumaimi, who immigrated to Sweden six years ago, took only four months to find a formula that explains a sequence of calculations known as the Bernoulli numbers, a code that had stumped some of the best experts in the field, Agence France-Presse reported.

Using new data from ESA’s XMM-Newton spaceborne observatory, astronomers have probed closer than ever to a supermassive black hole lying deep at the core of a distant active galaxy. The galaxy – known as 1H0707-495 – was observed during four 48-hr-long orbits of XMM-Newton around Earth, starting in January 2008. The black hole at its centre was thought to be partially obscured from view by intervening clouds of gas and dust, but these current observations have revealed the innermost depths of the galaxy. “We can now start to map out the region immediately around the black hole,” says Andrew Fabian,...

It was at Caltech that Gell-Mann helped to lay the foundations for our understanding of the components that make up matter. He drafted a blueprint of subatomic physics that he called the Eightfold Way. At the time, physicists understood that atoms are constructed from protons and neutrons, but they had also found many other mysterious particles. The Eightfold Way made sense of this baffling menagerie, finding within it places for particles never even imagined. The work was so important that it netted Gell-Mann a Nobel Prize in 1969. In 1984 Gell-Mann pursued his dream of working in other fields by...

Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all. For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley's argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe "out there" into which we have each individually arrived....

The rare earth metal is the 53rd naturally occurring element to possess the property An old element just learned a new trick under pressure. When cooled and squeezed very hard, the soft metallic element europium turns into a superconductor, allowing electrons to flow unfettered by resistance, a study appearing May 13 in Physical Review Letters shows. The results make europium the 53rd of the 92 naturally occurring elements to possess superconductivity, which, if harnessed, could make for more efficient energy transfer. Europium, a rare earth metal with a silver color, is strongly magnetic at everyday temperatures and pressure. Study coauthor...

Herbert York, a leading physicist in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II who later became an arms-control advocate and founding chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, USA, passed away. He was 87. York died on Tuesday at Thornton Hospital in San Diego, the university announced, after a long illness. His death was attributed to acute myelogenous leukemia. “Herb York made this campus and this world a better place,” UC San Diego chancellor Marye Anne Fox said in a statement. Beginning with his work on the Manhattan Project, York held a series of high-level scientific,...

"The multiverse is no longer a model, it is a consequence of our models.” ~Aurelien Barrau, particle physicist at CERN The Hollywood blockbuster, The Golden Compass, adapted from the first volume of Pullman's classic sci-fi trilogy, "His Dark Materials" portrays various universes as only one reality among many, but how realistic is this kind of classic sci-fi plot? While it hasn’t been proven yet, many highly respected and credible scientists are now saying there’s reason to believe that parallel dimensions could very well be more than figments of our imaginations. "The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic...

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

One of quantum physics' crazier notions is that two particles seem to communicate with each other instantly, even when they're billions of miles apart. Albert Einstein, arguing that nothing travels faster than light, dismissed this as impossible "spooky action at a distance." The great man may have been wrong. A series of recent mind-bending laboratory experiments has given scientists an unprecedented peek behind the quantum veil, confirming that this realm is as mysterious as imagined. Quantum physics is the study of the very small -- atoms, photons and other particles. Unlike the cause-and-effect of our everyday physical world, subatomic particles...

For more than a decade, scientists have been frustrated in their attempts to create continuously emitting light sources from individual molecules because of an optical quirk called "blinking," but now scientists at the University of Rochester have uncovered the basic physics behind the phenomenon, and along with researchers at the Eastman Kodak Company, created a nanocrystal that constantly emits light. The findings, detailed online in today's issue of Nature, may open the door to dramatically less expensive and more versatile lasers, brighter LED lighting, and biological markers that track how a drug interact with a cell at a level never...

In a recent study, Bartolo Luque and Lucas Lacasa of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain have discovered a new pattern in primes that has surprisingly gone unnoticed until now. They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford’s law. In addition, this same pattern also appears in another number sequence, that of the leading digits of nontrivial Riemann zeta zeros, which is known to be related to the distribution of primes. Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications...

One of the technologies that seems a likely candidate for this funding is the rebirth of cold fusion, or now known as a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) such as featured in a 60 Minutes TV news magazine segment on April 19.

Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today. The model, published online May 6 in the journal Physical Review D, was developed by Research Associate Sourish Dutta and Professor of Physics Robert Scherrer at Vanderbilt University, working with Professor of Physics Stephen Hsu and graduate student David Reeb at the University of Oregon. A cosmological phase transition -- similar to freezing -- is one of the distinctive aspects of this...

Enlarge ImageKilljoy. NASA's orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has not reproduced a previously claimed signature of dark matter. Credit: NASA and General Dynamics Last November, data from a balloon-borne particle detector circling the South Pole revealed a dramatic excess of high-energy particles from space--a possible sign of dark matter, the mysterious substance whose gravity seems to hold our galaxy together. But satellite data reported today stick a pin in that claim. Researchers working with NASA's orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope say they do not see the purported excess. The observations don't disprove the existence of dark matter, but they...

New data from two experiments -- one in space, one on a balloon floating above Antarctica -- hint at a tantalizing detection of dark matter, the mysterious stuff comprising 85% of the universe's matter. The evidence is a reported excess of high-energy electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, which could be created as dark matter particles annihilate or decay. The signal from Fermi, the orbiting gamma-ray telescope, is subtle, whereas that claimed by the balloon-borne Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) is much more pronounced. The differences are puzzling, but the findings -- according to some -- could herald the birth...

As modern cosmologists rely more and more on the ominous "dark matter" to explain otherwise inexplicable observations, much effort has gone into the detection of this mysterious substance in the last two decades, yet no direct proof could be found that it actually exists. Even if it does exist, dark matter would be unable to reconcile all the current discrepancies between actual measurements and predictions based on theoretical models. Hence the number of physicists questioning the existence of dark matter has been increasing for some time now. Competing theories of gravitation have already been developed which are independent of this...

BRIAN GREENE spent a good part of the last decade extolling the virtues of string theory. He dreamed that one day it would provide physicists with a theory of everything that would describe our universe - ours and ours alone. His bestselling book The Elegant Universe eloquently captured the quest for this ultimate theory. "But the fly in the ointment was that string theory allowed for, in principle, many universes," says Greene, who is a theoretical physicist at Columbia University in New York. In other words, string theory seems equally capable of describing universes very different from ours. Greene hoped...

ScienceDaily (May 2, 2009) — The great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously noted the similarities between advanced technology and magic. This summer on the big screen, the young wizard Harry Potter will once again don his magic invisibility cloak and disappear. Meanwhile, researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley will be studying an invisibility cloak of their own that also hides objects from view. A team led by Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center, has created a “carpet cloak”...

This artist's conception shows a rogue black hole floating near a globular star cluster on the outskirts of the Milky Way. New calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way. Fortunately, the closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years from Earth. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA) (PhysOrg.com) -- It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie: rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close. In fact, new calculations by...