In this month's edition of Physics World, a group of physicists describe how unique structures in the natural world are inspiring scientists to develop new types of materials with unprecedented properties.
From adhesive tape inspired by the toes of geckoes to a potential flaw-resistant coating of aeroplanes inspired by mother of pearl, the attractiveness centres on one concept -- hierarchical design.
In an editorial published online today in BMJ, Johns Hopkins bioethicist Jeremy Sugarman and other experts warn that action is urgently needed to deal with possible unintended consequences of India's new policy protecting research participants.
Steady rotation of the Cascade arc
Ray E. Wells and Robert McCaffrey write that the clockwise geologic displacement of the 16 million-year-old (m.y.) ancestral Cascade volcanic arc from the presently active volcanic chain in the northwestern U.S. and Canada is in the same sense and at nearly the same rate as the motions calculated from Global Positioning System (GPS) over the past 15 years.
If some volcanoes operate on geologic timescales, Costa Rica's Irazú had something of a short fuse. In a new study in the journal Nature, scientists suggest that the 1960s eruption of Costa Rica's largest stratovolcano was triggered by magma rising from the mantle over a few short months, rather than thousands of years or more, as many scientists have thought. The study is the latest to suggest that deep, hot magma can set off an eruption fairly quickly, potentially providing an extra tool for detecting an oncoming volcanic disaster.
EUGENE, Ore. -- University of Oregon chemist David C. Johnson likens his lab's newly published accomplishments to combining two flavors of ice cream -- vanilla and chocolate -- and churning out thousands of flavors to appeal to any taste bud.
In reality, though, he is referring to his game-changing approach to synthesize thousands of new compounds with ultra low thermal conductivity and other unusual properties quickly instead of the traditional and time-consuming preparative approach that is limited to just a few thermodynamically stable compounds.
WASHINGTON D.C., July 31, 2013 -- What happens to a resonant wireless power transfer system in the presence of complex electromagnetic environments, such as metal plates? A team of researchers explored the influences at play in this type of situation, and they describe in the American Institute of Physics' journal AIP Advances how efficient wireless power transfer can indeed be achieved in the presence of metal plates.
Basic chemistry tells us that a bond between atoms can form if it is energetically more favorable for the atoms to stick together than staying apart. This fundamentally requires an attractive force between the atoms. However, new theoretical predictions show that the combination of a repelling force and controlled noise from an environment can also have the surprising effect of leading to a bound state, although one with quite exotic properties.
The Standard Model, which has given the most complete explanation up to now of the universe, has gaps, and is unable to explain phenomena like dark matter or gravitational interaction between particles. Physicists are therefore seeking a more fundamental theory that they call "New Physics", but up to now there has been no direct proof of its existence, only indirect observation of dark matter, as deduced, among other things, from the movement of the galaxies.
With the "green" reputation of large hydroelectric dams already in question, scientists are reporting that millions of smaller dams on rivers around the world make an important contribution to the greenhouse gases linked to global climate change. Their study, showing that more methane than previously believed bubbles out of the water behind small dams, appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Virginia Commonwealth University researchers have discovered, in theory, the possibility of creating large, hollow magnetic cage molecules that could one day be used in medicine as a drug delivery system to non-invasively treat tumors, and in other emerging technologies.
Social phenomena fascinate with their complexity, but are not easily understood. Pawel Sobkowicz, an independent researcher based in Warsaw, Poland, has developed a model to study the dynamics of normal people, called 'agents', and their response to a given piece of information, depending on their emotional state. In a study about to be published in EPJ B, the author shows that opinion dynamics differ depending on whether the agent is agitated or not.
Ecosystem services are a significant research and policy topic and there are many modelling and mapping approaches aimed at understanding the stocks, demands and flows of ecosystem goods and services on different scales.
Chemical flasks and inconvenient chemostats for cultivation of bacteria are likely soon to be discarded. Researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw were first to construct a microfluidic system allowing for merging, transporting and splitting of microdroplets. Since now, hundreds of different bacteria cultures can be maintained simultaneously in a single system, which could speed up the research on restistance of bacteria to antibiotics.
Boulder, Colo., USA - The complete August 2013 issue of Lithosphere is now available online. Papers covering the lithosphere of China and Tibet dominate the issue, with articles on the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan and the Idaho, USA, Snake River plain as well. The issue also features an article on diamond prospecting in India, a numerical modeling study, and an open access research focus article that asks, "Is it possible to predict the past?"
As the world starts feeling the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and consequent global temperature rise, researchers are looking for a Plan B to mitigate climate change. A group of German scientists has now come up with an environmentally friendly method that they say could do just that. The technique, dubbed carbon farming, consists in planting trees in arid regions on a large scale to capture CO2. They publish their study today in Earth System Dynamics, a journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).