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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...

Scientists Detect Neutrinos from Sun’s Core

Aug 31, 2014 by News Staff

A multinational collaboration of physicists has directly detected neutrinos created by the proton-proton fusion process going on at the heart of the Sun. Physicists...

According to Prof Adrian Bejan, the supersonic trans-Atlantic Concorde aircraft went the way of the dodo - it hit an evolutionary cul-de-sac. This image shows the British Airways Concorde in 1986. Image credit: Eduard Marmet / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Physics Law Helps Explain Evolution of Passenger Airplanes

Jul 23, 2014 by News Staff

A new study, published in the Journal of Applied Physics, uses a now-famous law of physics called the Constructal law to witness the evolution of airplane...

The tiny temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background, shown here as color, trace primordial density fluctuations in the early universe that seed the later growth of galaxies. Gravitational waves from inflation are expected to produce much a fainter pattern that includes twisting B-mode polarization, consistent with the B-mode polarization pattern observed by BICEP2, which is shown here as black lines. The line segments show the polarization strength and orientation at different spots on the sky. Image credit: BICEP2 Collaboration.

Higgs Boson, BICEP2 Results Could Point to New Physics beyond Standard Model

Jun 25, 2014 by News Staff

Based on the discovery of the Higgs boson and the recent results from the BICEP2 collaboration, UK physicists have made a surprising prediction: the Universe...

Digital art by Les Bossinas, Cortez III Service Corp., 1998.

Australian Researchers Simulate Time Travel

Jun 23, 2014 by News Staff

A group of physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia has used photons to simulate quantum particles traveling through a wormhole back in...

Higgs boson decays to four muons: lines denote other particles, and energy deposited is shown in blue. Image credit: CMS.

Higgs Boson Decays to Fermions, CERN Study Confirms

Jun 23, 2014 by News Staff

New research conducted by physicists from CERN’s Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider has confirmed that the Higgs boson...

Exciton: Physicists Detect Energy-Carrying Quasiparticle in Metal

Jun 2, 2014 by News Staff

A team of physicists led by Dr Hrvoje Petek from the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Physics and Astronomy has detected, for the first time,...

European physicists say they have discovered how to create matter from light. Image credit: SLAC Information Management and Portal Solutions.

Physicists Find Way to Convert Light into Matter

May 19, 2014 by News Staff

An international team of scientists headed by Prof Steve Rose from Imperial College in London, UK, has discovered how to create matter from light. European...

Extremely Rare Type of Iron Oxide Found in Ancient Chinese Pottery

May 13, 2014 by News Staff

Sometimes, studying past technologies leads to remarkable discoveries that can help design better materials for the future. This is the little known science...

Ununseptium: Superheavy Element 117 Confirmed

May 2, 2014 by News Staff

Physicists at GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, have used calcium-ion beams and radioactive berkelium-249 to produce two...