Using DESY's bright research light sources, scientists have opened a new door to better solar cells, novel superconductors and smaller hard-drives. The research reported in the scientific journal Nature Communications this week enhances the understanding of the interface of two materials, where completely new properties can arise. With their work, the team of Prof. Andrivo Rusydi from the National University of Singapore and Prof. Michael Rübhausen from the Hamburg Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) have solved a long standing mystery in the physics of condensed matter.
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A team of scientists, led by Assistant Professor Andrivo Rusydi from the Department of Physics at the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Faculty of Science, has successfully developed a technique to study the interface between materials, shedding light on the new properties that arise when two materials are put together.
With a better understanding of how materials interface, scientists can tweak the properties of different materials more easily, and this opens doors to the development of better solar cells, novel superconductors and smaller hard drives.
"They can smell but they can't distinguish between chemical cues," Dixson said.
Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is absorbed into ocean waters, where it dissolves and lowers the pH of the water. Acidic waters affect fish behavior by disrupting a specific receptor in the nervous system, called GABAA, which is present in most marine organisms with a nervous system. When GABAA stops working, neurons stop firing properly.
HOUGHTON, Mich., April 11, 2014 – In the last 100 years, Michigan has become warmer, with more rain coming through heavy downpours. Climate models suggest that the state will continue to warm and variability in precipitation patterns will increase, which will have consequences for the state's forests. A new U.S. Forest Service report describes the potential risks and opportunities of climate change for forests in the eastern Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula.
An analysis of temperature data since 1500 all but rules out the possibility that global warming in the industrial era is just a natural fluctuation in the earth's climate, according to a new study by McGill University physics professor Shaun Lovejoy.
Scientists of the German Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have deciphered a supposed climate paradox from the Miocene era by means of complex model simulations. When the Antarctic ice sheet grew to its present-day size around 14 million years ago, it did not get colder everywhere on the Earth, but there were regions that became warmer. A physical contradiction?
The rise and fall of acid rain is a global experiment whose results are preserved in the geologic record.
By analyzing samples from the Greenland ice sheet, University of Washington atmospheric scientists found clear evidence of the U.S. Clean Air Act. They also discovered a link between air acidity and how nitrogen is preserved in layers of snow, according to a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Candidates for a Nobel prize often have to wait more than 20 years to receive this highest of scientific accolades. According to a Correspondence by Santo Fortunato of Aalto University in Finland and colleagues, such nail-biting delays are becoming the norm — to the point that aspiring laureates may themselves have expired by the time the medal is due to be presented.
Physicist Richard Schnee hopes to find traces of dark matter by studying particles with low masses and interaction rates, some of which have never been probed before.
The ongoing search for invisible dark matter is the subject of a recent article involving physicists from Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences.
Research by Richard Schnee, assistant professor of physics, is referenced in Symmetry magazine, a joint publication of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto, Calif., and Fermilab in Batavia, Ill.
Earth scientists in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences have determined that the Tibetan Plateau—the world's largest, highest, and flattest plateau—had a larger initial extent than previously documented.
Their discovery is the subject of an article in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters (Elsevier, 2014).
Physicists in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences have helped confirm the existence of exotic hadrons—a type of matter that cannot be classified within the traditional quark model.
Their finding is the subject of a forthcoming article, prepared by the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. (LHCb is a multinational experiment, designed to identify new forces and particles in the universe.) Tomasz Skwarnicki, professor of physics, is one of the paper's lead authors.
Outdoor enthusiasts in Colorado's Front Range are occasionally rewarded with remarkable visibility brought about by dry, clear air and wind. But it's what people in the mountainous U.S. West can't see in conditions like this – ozone plunging down to the ground from high in the stratosphere, the second layer of the atmosphere – that has attracted the interest of NASA scientists, university scientists and air quality managers.
DENVER (April 10, 2014) – Satellite city projects across the developing world are putting an increasing number of poor people at risk to natural hazards and climate change, according to a new study from the University of Colorado Denver.
Throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America `new towns' are rapidly being built on the outskirts of major cities with the goal of relieving population pressures, according to study author Andrew Rumbach, PhD, assistant professor of planning and design at CU Denver's College of Architecture and Planning.
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Currently, there are more than 18,300 golf courses in the U.S. covering over 2.7 million acres. The ecological impacts of golf courses are not always straightforward with popular opinion suggesting that environmentally, golf courses have a negative impact on ecosystems. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have determined that golf courses can offer a viable habitat for stream salamanders, and enhanced management practices may be beneficial to ecosystems within golf courses.
University of Chicago researchers and their colleagues at University College London have performed a proof-of-concept experiment that will aid the future development of programmable quantum computers.