Science

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A Space Spider Watches Over Young Stars

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The Spider Nebula lies about 10,000 light-years away from Earth and is a site of active star formation.

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Researchers create perfect nanoscrolls from graphene’s imperfect form

Water filters of the future may be made from billions of tiny, graphene-based nanoscrolls. Each scroll, made by rolling up a single, atom-thick layer of graphene, could be tailored to trap specific molecules and pollutants in its tightly wound folds. Billions of these scrolls, stacked layer by layer, may produce a lightweight, durable, and highly selective water purification membrane.

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This sketch illustrates how a nanoscroll forms from a graphene oxide flake as a result of ultrasonic irradiation.

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Elusive state of superconducting matter discovered after 50 years

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cornell University, and collaborators have produced the first direct evidence of a state of electronic matter first predicted by theorists in 1964.

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A schematic image representing a periodic variation in the density of Cooper pairs (pairs of blue arrows pointing in opposite directions) within a cuprate superconductor. Densely packed rows of Cooper pairs alternate with regions having lower pair density and no pairs at all. Such a "Cooper pair density wave" was predicted 50 years ago but was just discovered using a unique "scanning Josephson tunneling microscope.

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Searching for Far Out and Wandering Worlds

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As an exoplanet passes in front of a more distant star, its gravity causes the trajectory of the starlight to bend, and in some cases, results in a brief brightening of the background star as seen by a telescope. The artistic animation illustrates this effect. This phenomenon of gravitational microlensing enables scientists to search for exoplanets that are too distant and dark to detect any other way.

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NASA Invests in Two-Dimensional Spacecraft, Reprogrammable Microorganisms

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Three-way battles in the quantum world

When water in a pot is slowly heated to the boil, an exciting duel of energies takes place inside the liquid. On the one hand there is the interaction energy that wants to keep the water molecules together because of their mutual attraction. On the other hand, however, the motional energy, which increases due to heating, tries to separate the molecules. Below the boiling point the interaction energy prevails, but as soon as the motional energy wins the water boils and turns into water vapour. This process is also known as a phase transition. In this scenario the interaction only involves water molecules that are in immediate proximity to one another.

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An artificial quantum world of atoms and light: Atoms (red) spontaneously arrange themselves in a checkerboard pattern as a result of the complex interplay between short- and long-range interactions.

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Topology explains queer electrical current boost in non-magnetic metal: Scientists reduce resistance in PdCoO2 with magnetic fields

Insights from pure mathematics are lending new insights to material physics, which could aid in development of new devices and sensors. Now an international team of physicists has discovered that applying a magnetic field to a non-magnetic metal made it conduct 70% more electricity, even though basic physics principles would have predicted the opposite.

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Applying a magnetic field to PdCoO2, a non-magnetic metal, made it conduct 70% more electricity, even though basic physics principles would have predicted the opposite.

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Catalyst could make production of key chemical more eco-friendly

The world has more carbon dioxide than it needs, and a team of Brown University chemists has come up with a potential way to put some of it to good use.

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This is nitrogen-rich graphene festooned with finely tuned copper nanoparticles selectively converts carbon dioxide to ethylene, a key commodity chemical.

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Quantum effects affect the best superconductor: Quantum effects explain why hydrogen sulphide is a superconductor at record-breaking temperatures

The theoretical results of a piece of international research published in Nature, whose first author is Ion Errea, a researcher at the UPV/EHU and DIPC, suggest that the quantum nature of hydrogen (in other words, the possibility of it behaving like a particle or a wave) considerably affects the structural properties of hydrogen-rich compounds (potential room-temperature superconducting substances). This is in fact the case of the superconductor hydrogen sulphide: a stinking compound that smells of rotten eggs, which when subjected to pressures a million times higher than atmospheric pressure, behaves like a superconductor at the highest temperature ever identified. This new advance in understanding the physics of high-temperature superconductivity could help to drive forward progress in the search for room-temperature superconductors, which could be used in levitating trains or next-generation supercomputers, for example.

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This is a structure with symmetric hydrogen bonds induced by the quantum behavior of the protons, represented by the fluctuating blue spheroids.

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Exotic quantum effects can govern the chemistry around us

Objects of the quantum world are of a concealed and cold-blooded nature: they usually behave in a quantum manner only when they are significantly cooled and isolated from the environment. Experiments carried out by chemists and physicists from Warsaw have destroyed this simple picture. It turns out that not only does one of the most interesting quantum effects occur at room temperature and higher, but it plays a dominant role in the course of chemical reactions in solutions!

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Protons can tunnel in solutions and at temperatures above the boiling point of water, found scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Pictured above: Part of the equipment used in experiments.

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