Earth

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion — the process that generates the sun's prodigious output of energy.

The quest for faster electronic devices recently got something more than a little bump up in technological knowhow. Scientists at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. discovered that the thin, smooth, crystalline sheets needed to make semiconductors, which are the foundation of modern computers, might be grown into smoother sheets by managing the random darting motions of the atomic particles that affect how the crystals grow.

To make thin films for semiconductors in electronic devices, layers of atoms must be grown in neat, crystalline sheets. But while some materials grow smooth crystals, others tend to develop bumps and defects – a serious problem for thin-film manufacturing.

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. – January 21, 2010 – The bubbles in your champagne that appear to jump out of your glass and tickle your nose are exhibiting a behavior quite similar to the tiny bubbles found throughout the world's oceans, according to bubble physicist Helen Czerski.

But while the champagne bubbles are likely to raise your spirits, those in the ocean can cause clouds to form and affect the climate.

For the first time, the widely used molecular synthesis technique known as click chemistry has been safely applied to a living organism. Researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have crafted a unique copper-free version of click chemistry to create biomolecular probes for in vivo studies of live mice. Conventional click chemistry reactions require a copper catalyst that is toxic to cells and organisms.

Researchers who hope to create quantum computers are currently investigating various methods to store data. Nitrogen atoms embedded in diamond show promise for encoding quantum bits (qubits), but the process of reading the information results in an extremely weak signal. Now physicists have demonstrated a roundabout approach for generating a significantly stronger signal from these sorts of qubits.

The chain of earthquakes along the North Anatolian fault shows a gap south of Istanbul. The expected earthquakes in this region represent an extreme danger for the Turkish megacity. A new computer study now shows that the tensions in this part of the fault zone could trigger several earthquakes instead of one individual large quake event.