Most materials swell when they warm, and shrink when they cool. But UConn physicist Jason Hancock has been investigating a substance that responds in reverse: it shrinks when it warms.
Although thermal expansion, and the cracking and warping that often result, are an everyday occurrence - in buildings, bridges, electronics, and almost anything else exposed to wide temperature swings - physicists have trouble explaining why solids behave that way.
What can skyrmions do for you? These ghostly quantum rings, heretofore glimpsed only under extreme laboratory conditions, just might be the basis for a new type of computer memory that never loses its grip on the data it stores.
An exotic, swirling object with the sci-fi name of a "magnetic skyrmion" could be the future of nanoelectronics and memory storage. Physicists at UC Davis and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have now succeeded in making magnetic skyrmions, formerly found at temperatures close to absolute zero, at room temperature.
SEATTLE - Toxic runoff from highways, parking lots and other developed surfaces is killing many of the adult coho salmon in urban streams along the West Coast, according to a new study that for the first time documents the fatal connection between urban stormwater and salmon survival.
The good news is that the same study published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology also found that inexpensive filtration of urban runoff through simple columns of sand and soil can completely prevent the toxic effects on fish.
Some of the most ancient birds were capable of performing aerodynamic feats in a manner similar to many living birds, according to a new study of the fossil wing of a primitive bird, led by a PhD student at the University of Bristol, UK.
Birds have an enormously long evolutionary history: theearliest of them, the famed Archaeopteryx, lived 150 million years ago in what is now southern Germany. However, whether these early birds were capable of flying and, if so, how well has remained shrouded in scientific controversy.
The researchers in the two groups have succeeded in getting a trapped atom to imitate behaviours that contradict its own fundamental laws, thus taking elements of science fiction to the microscopic world. "We have managed to get an atom to act as if it were infringing the nature of atomic systems, in other words, quantum physics and the theory of relativity.
As record ocean temperatures cause widespread coral bleaching across Hawaii, NOAA scientists confirm the same stressful conditions are expanding to the Caribbean and may last into the new year, prompting the declaration of the third global coral bleaching event ever on record.
Waters are warming in the Caribbean, threatening coral in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, NOAA scientists said. Coral bleaching began in the Florida Keys and South Florida in August, but now scientists expect bleaching conditions there to diminish.
A 48 million year-old horse-like equoid fetus has been discovered at the Messel pit near Frankfurt, Germany according to a study published October 7, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jens Lorenz Franzen from Senckenberg Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany, and Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues.
The naturally occurring bacteria on a frog's skin could be the most important tool for helping the animal fight off a deadly skin disease, according to an experiment conducted by Virginia Tech researchers.
Antibiotics to get rid of the normal bacteria don't significantly alter the rate of fungal infection, but they did cause the frogs to lose weight, suggesting that having their normal bacteria is important for frog health. In addition, treatment with probiotic bacteria did not decrease fungal infection as expected.
In collaboration with colleagues from Aalborg University, Technical University of Denmark (DTU) researchers have studied genes from wastewater treatment plants that may help bacteria to develop antimicrobial resistance. Their findings demonstrate that the treatment plants contain a great many genes that may generate resistance to a wide variety of antimicrobial agents.
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MADISON, Wis. - When it comes to using our natural resources, human beings want to know what we're going to get. We expect clean water every time we turn on the tap; beaches free of algae and bacteria; and robust harvests of crops, fish and fuel year after year. As a result, we try to manage the use of our resources in a way that minimizes their variability.
We seek a predictable "status quo."
WASHINGTON, D.C., October 6, 2015 - If you've ever waited on an airport runway for your plane to be de-iced, had to remove all your food so the freezer could defrost, or arrived late to work because you had to scrape the sheet of ice off your car windshield, you know that ice can cause major headaches.
X-ray crystallography reveals the three-dimensional structure of a molecule, thus making it possible to understand how it works and potentially use this knowledge to subsequently modulate its activity, especially for therapeutic or biotechnological purposes. For the first time, a study has shown that residual movements continue to animate proteins inside a crystal and that this movement "blurs" the structures obtained via crystallography. The study stresses that the more these residual movements are restricted, the better the crystalline order.