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This image shows the famous Trifid Nebula to the right of center; it appears as faint and ghostly at these infrared wavelengths when compared to the familiar view at visible wavelengths; this transparency has brought its own benefits - many previously hidden background objects can now be seen clearly; among these are two newly discovered Cepheid variable stars, the first ever spotted on the far side of our Milky Way Galaxy near its central plane. Image credit: ESO / VVV consortium / D. Minniti.

Stars May Generate Sound, Physicists Say

Mar 24, 2015 by News Staff

An international team of scientists headed by Dr G. Ravindra Kumar of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, has provided experimental...

Proton transfer channel across a quad-defect in graphene. Image credit: Murali Raju / Penn State.

Imperfect Graphene Could Lead to Better Fuel Cells, Water Filters

Mar 18, 2015 by News Staff

A group of scientists headed by Dr Franz Geiger of Northwestern University has found that slightly imperfect graphene shuttles protons, and only protons,...

Just a few layers of bubbles are enough to significantly decrease the height of the waves in a sloshing liquid. Image credit: Takeaway / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Physicists Explain Why Latte Less Likely to Spill than Coffee

Feb 25, 2015 by News Staff

In a new study published in the journal Physics of Fluids, a team of researchers has found that a few layers of foam can significantly dampen the sloshing...

An electron (green) hits a proton in a nucleus, creating a pion (green-skinned particle) and transforming the proton into a neutron. Image credit: Joanna Griffin / Jefferson Lab.

CERN Physicists Measure Polarizability of Pion

Feb 16, 2015 by News Staff

Scientists from CERN’s COMPASS collaboration have made the most precise measurement ever of the polarizability of pion – the fundamental low-energy...

Penta-Graphene: Scientists Discover New Allotrope of Carbon

Feb 5, 2015 by News Staff

An international team of scientists, led by Prof Puru Jena of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has discovered a new structural variant of...

Numerically calculated and experimentally observed optical polarization Möbius strips. Image credit: Thomas Bauer et al, 10.1126/science.1260635.

Physicists Create Möbius Strips out of Light

Jan 30, 2015 by News Staff

An international team of physicists, led by Dr Thomas Bauer from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and the Friedrich-Alexander-University...

A water droplet bouncing off a laser-treated platinum surface. Image credit: J. Adam Fenster / University of Rochester.

Physicists Create Super-Hydrophobic Metal Surfaces

Jan 21, 2015 by News Staff

A team of physicists at the University of Rochester has used lasers to make metal surfaces extremely water repellent, or super-hydrophobic. A water droplet...

This micromaser is a major step toward building quantum-computing systems out of semiconductor materials; a battery forces electrons to tunnel one by one through two double quantum dots located at each end of a cavity, moving from a higher energy level to a lower energy level and in the process giving off microwaves that build into a coherent beam of light. Image credit: Jason Petta.

Scientists Create Rice Grain-Sized Maser

Jan 16, 2015 by News Staff

A team of scientists led by Dr Jason Petta of Princeton University has built a rice grain-sized microwave laser, or maser, powered by single electrons...

A 9 cm-long capillary discharge waveguide used in BELLA experiments to generate 4.25-GeV electron beam. Image credit: Roy Kaltschmidt.

Compact Particle Accelerator Creates Electron Beam with Record-Breaking Energy

Dec 9, 2014 by News Staff

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab physicists using one of the most powerful lasers in the world have accelerated electrons to the highest energies ever recorded...

Dogs and cats need to move fluid against gravity into the body by means other than suction; they do this by lapping fluid with their tongue. When a dog drinks, it curls its tongue posteriorly while plunging it into the fluid and then quickly withdraws its tongue back into the mouth. During this fast retraction fluid sticks to the ventral part of the curled tongue and is drawn into the mouth due to inertia. The scientists studied several variations of this drinking behavior among many dog breeds, specifically, the relationship between tongue dynamics and geometry, lapping frequency, and dog weight; and also compared the results with the physical experiment of a rounded rod impact onto a fluid surface. Image credit: Emmanuel Keller aka Tambako The Jaguar / CC BY-ND 2.0.

Physicists Explain Why Dogs are Sloppy Drinkers

Nov 26, 2014 by News Staff

A team of scientists led by Dr Sunghwan Jung of Virginia Tech has identified and modeled the fluid dynamics at play when dogs (Canis lupus familiaris)...

This artist's concept shows what the very early Universe might have looked like. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt / SSC.

Gravity May Have Saved Very Early Universe – Study

Nov 20, 2014 by News Staff

A team of physicists from Denmark, Finland and the United Kingdom, led by Dr Matti Herranen University of Copenhagen, says that the spacetime curvature...

LHCb coil moving. Image credit: © CERN, 2003.

CERN Physicists Discover Two New Particles

Nov 19, 2014 by News Staff

Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment today announced the discovery of two new baryon particles, named Ξb’- and...

Concept of a dark-matter search using atomic clocks; by monitoring time discrepancies between two spatially separated clocks one could search for the passage of topological defects, such as the domain wall pictured here. Image credit: A. Derevianko & M. Pospelov.

GPS Might be Tool in Detecting Mysterious Dark Matter, Physicists Say

Nov 18, 2014 by News Staff

Two physicists – Dr Maxim Pospelov from the University of Victoria and Prof Andrei Derevianko of the University of Nevada, Reno – have proposed...

Candidate Higgs Decay to four muons recorded by the ATLAS experiment in 2012 (ATLAS)

Techni-Higgs: European Physicists Cast Doubt on Discovery of Higgs Boson

Nov 10, 2014 by News Staff

Two years after CERN scientists announced the discovery of the famed and elusive Higgs Boson, a team of physicists from Denmark, Belgium, and the United...

The Many Interacting Worlds approach hinges on the assumption that interactions between deterministically evolving worlds cause all quantum effects. Image credit: City University of New York.

Many Interacting Worlds: Physicists Propose Existence, Interaction of Parallel Universes

Nov 3, 2014 by News Staff

Parallel universes really exist and interact, says a team of scientists from the University of California Davis and Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia....

Australian National University scientists adjusting the hollow laser beam. Image credit: Stuart Hay.

Scientists Build ‘Long-Distance’ Optical Tractor Beam

Oct 21, 2014 by News Staff

A team of researchers led by Dr Vladlen Shvedov of the Australian National University’s Laser Physics Center in Canberra, Australia, has built what they...

CERN Physicists Discover New Subatomic Particle

Oct 12, 2014 by News Staff

According to scientists from CERN’s LHCb experiment, the discovery of a new type of meson, named Ds3*(2860)ˉ, will transform our understanding of...

An artist's conception of a Majorana fermion floating at the surface of the Fermi sea. Image credit: Alexey Drjahlov.

Majorana Fermion: Physicists Observe Elusive Particle

Oct 6, 2014 by News Staff

The Majorana fermion – a mysterious particle that is its own antiparticle – has been observed for the first time. An artist’s conception...

Thin sheets of ice push rocks across a dry lake in Death Valley when conditions are just right. Image credit: Norris RD et al.

Death Valley Sailing Stones Caught in Action for First Time

Sep 14, 2014 by News Staff

After more than seventy years of attempts to solve the mystery of Death Valley’s sailing stones, U.S. researchers led by Dr Brian Jackson of Boise...