Today, scientists from the XENON collaboration announced the result from their search for the elusive component of our universe known as dark matter. After analyzing one hundred days of data taken with the XENON100 experiment, they see no evidence for the existence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), the leading candidates for the mysterious dark matter. The XENON100 experiment is operated deep underground at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory of the Italian National Institute for Physics (INFN).
Earth
Adam Acar and Yuya Muraki of the Kobe City University of Foreign Studies surveyed and questioned Twitter users and tracked updates from people in the disaster-struck area on the social media site two weeks after the Tohoku earthquake and devastating tsunami of March 11. They hoped to determine what benefits such a system can bring to people involved in a disaster and to those hoping to hear news.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Easy-to-follow recipes for radioactive compounds like those found in nuclear fuel storage pools, liquid waste containment areas and other contaminated aqueous environments have been developed by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories.
"The need to understand the chemistry of these compounds has never been more urgent, and these recipes facilitate their study," principal investigator May Nyman said of her group's success in encouraging significant amounts of relevant compounds to self-assemble.
PASADENA, Calif.—For many people, Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite technology is little more than a high-tech version of a traditional paper map. Used in automobile navigation systems and smart phones, GPS helps folks find their way around a new neighborhood or locate a nearby restaurant. But GPS is doing much, much more for researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech): it's helping them find their way to a more complete understanding of Earth's interior structure.
Chlorine is an abundant and readily available halogen gas commonly associated with the sanitation of swimming pools and drinking water. Could a one-atom thick sheet of this element revolutionize the next generation of flat-panel displays and lighting technology?
Wind blowing on the ocean is a crucial factor mixing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the ocean depths and keeping it from going back into the atmosphere.
For more than two decades scientists have suspected there's another – possibly substantial – source of energy for mixing that's generated in the ocean where cold, heavy water collides with warm, light water. However, there's never been a way to get enough measurements of such a "front" to prove this – until now.
A team led by Professor Andre Geim, a recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for graphene, can now show that electric current – a flow of electrons – can magnetise graphene.
The results, reported in Science, could be a potentially huge breakthrough in the field of spintronics.
Spintronics is a group of emerging technologies that exploit the intrinsic spin of the electron, in addition to its fundamental electric charge that is exploited in microelectronics.
Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine will present several key studies at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) annual meeting, including research providing critical insight into the prognosis and clinical treatment course of people with a certain subtype of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). The meeting is taking place April 9-16 in Honolulu.
An International team of scientists in the XENON collaboration, including several from the Weizmann Institute, announced on Thursday the results of their search for the elusive component of our universe known as dark matter. This search was conducted with greater sensitivity than ever before.
Scientists have discovered a method to control the gas-phase selective catalytic combustion of methane, so finely that if done at room temperature the reaction produces ethylene, while at lower temperatures it yields formaldehyde. The process involves using gold dimer cations as catalysts — that is, positively charged diatomic gold clusters. Being able to catalyze these reactions, at or below room temperature, may lead to significant cost savings in the synthesis of plastics, synthetic fuels and other materials.
COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- University of Maryland researchers have discovered a way to control magnetic properties of graphene that could lead to powerful new applications in magnetic storage and magnetic random access memory.
The finding by a team of Maryland researchers, led by Physics Professor Michael S. Fuhrer of the UMD Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials is the latest of many amazing properties discovered for graphene.
A step change in research relating to plasma nanoscience is needed for the world to overcome the challenge of sufficient energy creation and storage, says a leading scientist from CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering and the University of Sydney, Australia.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- When one cloud of gas meets another, they normally pass right through each other. But now, MIT physicists have created clouds of ultracold gases that bounce off each other like bowling balls, even though they are a million times thinner than air — the first time that such impenetrable gases have been observed.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Last year's $2 billion shutdown of European airspace following a volcanic eruption in Iceland alerted everyone to the danger that ash clouds can pose to aircraft engines.
Now, researchers have discovered that a new class of ceramic coatings could offer jet engines special protection against volcanic ash damage in the future.
A newly discovered magnetic phenomenon could accelerate data storage by several orders of magnitude.
With a constantly growing flood of information, we are being inundated with increasing quantities of data, which we in turn want to process faster than ever. Oddly, the physical limit to the recording speed of magnetic storage media has remained largely unresearched. In experiments performed on the particle accelerator BESSY II of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, Dutch researchers have now achieved ultrafast magnetic reversal and discovered a surprising phenomenon.