They are the coldest objects in the Universe and are so fragile that even a single photon can heat and destroy them.
Known as Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) and consisting of just a cluster of atoms, it has up until now been impossible to measure and control these remarkable forms of matter simultaneously.
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 27, 2013 – Mention vuvuzela to soccer fans, and they may cringe. The plastic horn rose to prominence during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where tens of thousands of those instruments blared in packed stadiums. The loud, buzzing noise soon became a major annoyance, disrupting players and even fans watching on TV.
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 27, 2013 – Scientists have recorded and identified one of the most prominent sounds of a warming planet: the sizzle of glacier ice as it melts into the sea. The noise, caused by trapped air bubbles squirting out of the disappearing ice, could provide clues to the rate of glacier melt and help researchers better monitor the fast-changing polar environments.
The latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS') award-winning Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions podcast series features an advance in smartphone-based imaging that could help physicians in resource-limited locations monitor their patients' health. The development converts smartphones into powerful mini-microscopes that, for the first time, can detect individual viruses.
Magnets have fascinated mankind for millenia. From the Greek philosophers to scientists of the modern era, which saw the rise of quantum mechanics, magnets have been pondered and investigated. Nowadays, they are not only intriguing oddities of nature, but also constitute crucial building blocks of modern technology: Ranging from data storage over medical instrumentation to transportation. And yet, to this day, they continue to puzzle scientists.
Alexandria, VA – Geoscientists using every resource available to them — from bare-earth LIDAR technology to knowledge of turn-of-the-century fashion — have helped correct a 100-year-old mistake about where the San Andreas Fault rupture point was for the historic 1906 earthquake.
James Hanna likes to have fun with his engineering views of physics.
So when he and his colleague Jemal Guven visited their friend Martin Michael Müller in France on a rainy, dreary day, the three intellects decided to stay in. Guven, absent-mindedly switching between channels on the television, stumbled upon a documentary on whirling dervishes, best described as a Sufi religious order, who commemorate the teachings of 13th century Persian mystic and poet Rumi through spinning at a fixed speed in their floor length skirts.
A force that intricately links the rotation of the Earth with the direction of weather patterns in the atmosphere has been shown to play a crucial role in the creation of the hypnotic patterns created by the skirts of the Whirling Dervishes.
The holography technique revealed that the seahorse's head is shaped to minimize the disturbance of water in front of its mouth before it strikes. Just above and in front of the seahorse's nostrils is a kind of "no wake zone," and the seahorse angles its head precisely in relation to its prey so that no fluid disturbance reaches it.
Other small fish with blunter heads, such as the three-spine stickleback, have no such advantage.
A colloquium paper published in EPJ D looks into the alleged issues associated with quantum theory. Berthold-Georg Englert from the National University of Singapore reviews a selection of the potential problems of the theory. In particular, he discusses cases when mathematical tools are confused with the actual observed sub-atomic scale phenomena they are describing. Such tools are essential to provide an interpretation of the observations, but cannot be confused with the actual object of studies.
Washington, D.C.— Government calculations of total U.S. methane emissions may underestimate the true values by 50 percent, a new study finds. The results are published the week of November 25 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and cast doubt on a recent Environmental Protection Agency decision to downscale its emissions estimate.
Current official inventories of methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas released from landfills, livestock ranches and oil and gas facilities, may be underestimated both nationally and in California by a factor of about 1.5, according to new research from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and others.
Cambridge, Mass. – November 25, 2013 – Emissions of methane from fossil fuel extraction and refining activities in the south-central United States are nearly five times higher than previous estimates, according to researchers at Harvard University and seven other institutions. Their study, published this week in PNAS, also suggests that the contribution from livestock operations may be twice as high as previously thought.
Boulder, Colo., USA – GSA Bulletin articles posted online ahead of print in November cover sedimentology in the Sinai-Negev erg of Egypt and Israel; petrology in the Tongling area of Anhui Province in eastern China; paleotopography in the Central Andes of Argentina; sedimentology of the Monterey Submarine Canyon, offshore California, USA; geochronology of Volcán Tepetiltic, western Mexico; and thermochronology of the Appalachian Mountains.
Weizmann Institute scientists have taken a quantum leap toward understanding the phenomenon known as superconductivity: They have created the world's smallest SQUID – a device used to measure magnetic fields – which has broken the world record for sensitivity and resolution.