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Researchers in South Korea and the UK have produced a film that makes electricity when you bend it - and crucially it is over a million times better at this than other crystalline solids with the same properties. Their approach makes it possible to control the strength of permanent electric fields in designer films, which is required for devices like photovoltaics. Piezoelectric materials generate electric fields when pressed or pulled. In contrast, flexoelectric materials produce these fields when bent - they react to variation in strain across the material, rather than strain itself. But because solids are typically difficult to bend,...

Enlarge Image Antimatter reservoir. A newly discovered belt of antiprotons lies within the innermost portion (pink) of Earth's magnetosphere, the large bubblelike region interior to the blue arc that is controlled by the planet's magnetic field. Credit: Aaron Kaase/NASA/Goddard A newly discovered belt of antimatter circling Earth could be an astronaut's best friend. The belt, which consists of antiprotons trapped by Earth's magnetic field several hundred kilometers above the planet's surface, may ultimately become a key source of fuel for missions venturing beyond the solar system. Researchers analyzing data from the PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter/Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics)...

Intense pressure can force neutrons into cubes rather than spheres, say physicistsInside atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons fill space with a packing density of 0.74, meaning that only 26 percent of the volume of the nucleus in is empty. That's pretty efficient packing. Neutrons achieve a similar density inside neutron stars, where the force holding neutrons together is the only thing that prevents gravity from crushing the star into a black hole. Today, Felipe Llanes-Estrada at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and Gaspar Moreno Navarro at Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, say neutrons can do even better. These...

Manchester is hosting a series of events to mark the centenary of a paper by Ernest Rutherford that changed the way we looked at the world and Universe around us.In 1911, Rutherford, described as the father of nuclear physics, presented his research to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which - for the first time - described a "planetary structure" of atoms, one that we still recognise today. "Before Rutherford, people had thought about atoms as an amorphous lump, the "plum pudding model" we sometimes hear about," explained Catherine Rushmore, science curator at the Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi)....

TO infinity and beyond? We may not have any viable alternative fuel sources here on Earth yet, but scientists may have discovered an alternative – in space. Researchers at the Pamela satellite (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics), discovered the largest known collection of anti-matter near Earth, trapped between the Van Allen belts. The Van Allen belts are a series of donut-shaped rings containing positively charged particles trapped by cosmic rays, solar winds and Earth's magnetic field. The belts themselves are formed by the particles “smashing” into molecules that make up Earth’s atmosphere, causing showers of particles. It...

While Matthew Nesbit opines on peak oil being a uniting cause, this short essay on thorium power is instructive and relevant. – Anthony Guest post by David ArchibaldEarly in June, I gave a lecture entitled “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” at the Institute for World Politics (a graduate school for the CIA and State Department) in Washington. From that lecture, following are a couple of slides pertaining to the advantage of thorium relative to uranium for nuclear power: To run a 1,000 MW reactor for a year requires one tonne of nuclear material to be fissioned. In the case of...

Study hard, receive a science or engineering degree, and your reward will be a well-paying job in your chosen field. That's part of the sales pitch for those trying to attract more women into science. But according to a new U.S. government study, the "reward" includes earning 12% less than your male counterparts. The 11-page report(PDF), "Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation," is the first analysis of women working in technical fields (STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) by the Commerce Department's Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA). The study is based on data from the 2009...

Stephen Hawking is squaring off with God, saying that God did not have a hand in creating the universe and that the "laws of science" can explain how the universe created itself from nothing. In the premiere episode of The Discovery Channel’s latest series "Curiosity," set for Sunday at 8 p.m. ET, Hawking takes on the question: "Is There a Creator?" Hawking, who has done extensive research on several contentious topics such as time travel, parallel universes and black holes, says that God was not necessary for the creation of the universe. He proposes that it is possible that the...

Professor Stephen Hawking's support for the global warming myth raises doubts about his knowledge of physics. Professor Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" is one of the books I would like to reread if I could find the time. However, after learning that he supports the global warming myth I would read the book a little more critically than I did the first time. Hawking says he's concerned about earth becoming as hot as Venus, but the alleged "greenhouse effect" cannot explain temperatures on Venus as I noted in my previous post. Venus Not an Example of Greenhouse Gas...

Ever wondered what would happen if the dimension of time came to a sudden end? A new experiment reveals all One of the most exciting areas of science is the emerging field of spacetime analogues. This is the discipline in which physicists play around with systems that have a formal mathematical link with general relativity. For example, changes in the way electrons move in graphene as it is cooled are identical to the changes that may have occurred in the universe soon after the big bang. So physicists can use cool graph to test theories about the universe's earliest behaviour....

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers who have been working for nearly a decade to piece together the process by which an enzyme repairs sun-damaged DNA have finally witnessed the entire process in full detail in the laboratory. What they saw contradicts fundamental notions of how key biological molecules break up during the repair of sunburn – and that knowledge could someday lead to drugs or even lotions that could heal sunburn in humans. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Ohio State University researchers and their colleagues confirm what was previously known about the enzyme photolyase, which is...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is offering money to researchers looking at identifying and controlling timing mechanisms in cells, including those of the human body. The blue sky gazing loon-collective notes that no single "master switch" has been found to control genes' activities. But it hopes that the "Biochronicity" programme will find a way to understand and predict "temporal features of biological systems". The four-year programme will start by identifying "episequences and validation in experimental biological systems". After two years, DARPA hopes to move to Phase II, which aims to conduct Live Fire Tests. Should the research prove...

Radio noise from distant cosmos is six times louder than expected..... LONG BEACH, Calif. - Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected. The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it. Of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can't very efficiently. But radio waves can....

A violation of one of the oldest empirical laws of physics has been observed by scientists at the University of Bristol. Their experiments on purple bronze, a metal with unique one-dimensional electronic properties, indicate that it breaks the Wiedemann-Franz Law. This historic discovery is described in a paper published today in Nature Communications. In 1853, two German physicists, Gustav Wiedemann and Rudolf Franz, studied the thermal conductivity (a measure of a system’s ability to transfer heat) of a number of elemental metals and found that the ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities was approximately the same for different metals...

Observations led by astronomers at the University of Warwick have shown that the flash from one of the biggest and brightest bangs yet recorded by astronomers comes from a massive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. The black hole appears to have ripped apart a star that wandered too close, creating a powerful beam of energy that crossed the 3.8 billion light years to Earth. Their research was published June 16, 2011, in the journal Science, in a paper entitled "An Extremely Luminous Panchromatic Outburst from the Nucleus of a Distant Galaxy". The high energy X-rays...

A main source of the 44 trillion watts of heat that flows from the interior of the Earth is the decay of radioactive isotopes in the mantle and crust. Scientists using the KamLAND neutrino detector in Japan have measured how much heat is generated this way by capturing geoneutrinos released during radioactive decay. The Earth has cooled since its formation, yet the decay of radiogenic isotopes, and in particular uranium, thorium and potassium, in the planet’s interior provides a continuing heat source. The current total heat flux from the Earth to space is 44.2±1.0 TW, but the relative contributions from residual...

Thane Heins´ "Perepiteia" generator seems to turn magnetic friction into a magnetic boost, causing the motor to accelerate in a positive feedback loop Thane Heins knows the track record of inventors that claim to make breakthroughs in power generation methods, especially when they claim to defy the second law of thermodynamics. Every so often, a (usually untrained) scientist comes along with a machine that supposedly creates more energy than is put in. Every time, the ideas have been rebuked by real scientists. That's why 46-year-old Heins, a college drop-out from Ottawa who's been working on his project since 1985,...

Enlarge Image Turmoil. Magnetism produces much of the sun's surface phenomena, such as these sunspots, seen in ultraviolet light. Credit: NASA/TRACE Researchers have discovered that one of the mysterious forces that sweep the sun's surface shows an unexpectedly strong connection with the number of sunspots, magnetic disturbances that can affect Earth's weather and telecommunications. The findings should improve predictions of the sun's dynamics and might even help scientists develop better climate models. Along with heat and light, the sun emits x-rays and magnetically charged particles that can endanger astronauts, fry circuits aboard satellites orbiting Earth, and overload electric power...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Astronomy is a science of extremes - the biggest, the hottest, and the most massive. Today, astrophysicist Bryan Gaensler (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues announced that they have linked two of astronomy's extremes, showing that some of the biggest stars in the cosmos become the strongest magnets when they die. "The source of these very powerful magnetic objects has been a mystery since the first one was discovered in 1998. Now, we think we have solved that mystery," says Gaensler. The astronomers base their conclusions on data taken with CSIRO's...

Magnetic Stars The puzzle of `magnetic stars' solved by astrophysicists of the Max Planck Society How does one explain the enormous magnetic field strengths of the so-called `magnetic stars'? This question concerning magnetic fields in the cosmos, first posed half a century ago, has now been answered by scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching. With 3-dimensional numerical simulations they have found the magnetic field configurations that underly the strong magnetic fields observed on the surface of the so-called magnetic A-stars and magnetic White Dwarfs, and how these fields can survive for the life time of these...