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The best refrigerator magnet ever? ScienceNOW Share    
There are limits to just how magnetic a material can be. Or so researchers thought. A compound of iron and nitrogen is about 18% more magnetic than the most magnetic material currently known, a team of materials scientists claims. If such magnets could be produced commercially, they could, for example, allow electronics manufacturers to equip computer hard drives with smaller "write heads" capable of cramming them with more information. Other researchers are reacting to the announcement with caution, however, as similar claims about the controversial material have fallen through in the past. Read the associated APS March Meeting abstract. More
Graphene used to make a hydrogen molecule "parking garage" Scientific American Share
As automakers ramp up their plans to put greener vehicles on the road, hydrogen storage has become a pivotal issue. Whereas it's been suggested that graphene could play an important role in retaining hydrogen for use in fuel cells and other technologies, a team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia say they've found a way to configure graphene that enables it to hold 100 times more hydrogen molecules than a single layer of the carbon-based substance. Read the associated APS March Meeting abstract. More Songbirds may help solve speech disorders St. Louis Globe-Democrat Share
U.S. scientists say they're using songbirds to gain insight into how the human brain functions, which may help treat speech disorders and related diseases. Read the associated APS March Meeting abstract. More Superchilly chemistry ScienceNews Share
Researchers have been able to stop and start chemical reactions between molecules at temperatures colder than the depths of outer space. And new theoretical descriptions help explain the quantum mechanical details of these ultracold chemical reactions. Read the associated APS March Meeting abstract. More
How does a worm wriggle? ScienceNOW Share
The transparent, millimeter-long worm Caenorhabditis elegans may be the world's best understood creature. Thanks to decades of study, scientists know its full genome sequence, exactly how many cells it contains, and even the connections of all of its 302 neurons. But now a team of biophysicists has made a surprising discovery: Nearly all of the nematode's various movements can be reproduced by adding four basic patterns of motion. Meanwhile, to study the neurological basis of the worm's motion, another team has genetically engineered a C. elegans that can be remote controlled with laser light. Read the associated APS March Meeting abstract. More Body heat may draw particles into breathing range ScienceNews Share
In small rooms, body heat may draw particles to all the wrong places. Thermal plumes radiating off a person can waft microbes, pollen and dust into breathing range, a study presented March 16 at a meeting of the American Physical Society finds. Read the associated APS March Meeting abstract. More First quantum effects seen in visible object NewScientist Share
Does Schrodinger's cat really exist? You bet. The first ever quantum superposition in an object visible to the naked eye has been observed. Aaron O'Connell and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did not actually produce a cat that was dead and alive at the same time, as Erwin Schrodinger proposed in a notorious thought experiment 75 years ago. But they did show that a tiny resonating strip of metal -- only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope -- can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time. Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very act of observation would take it out of superposition. Read the associated APS March Meeting abstract. More
Big or small, financial bubbles burst alike ScienceNews Share
Statistically speaking, size doesn’t matter when a financial bubble bursts. The big crashes may hurt a lot more, but new analyses of "microbubbles" presented March 15 at a meeting of the American Physical Society find that the same mathematical laws underlying massive economic crises are also at work in tiny fluctuations that occur on the order of milliseconds. Read the associated APS March Meeting abstract. More Physicists create carbon magnetism by removing atoms from graphite PhysOrg Share
Physicists have found that, by removing individual atoms from a graphite surface, they can create local magnetic moments in the graphite. The discovery could lead to techniques to artificially create magnets that are nonmetallic and biocompatible, as well as cheaper and lighter than current magnets. Read the associated Physical Review Letters paper. More Nano-gadget holds the salt ScienceNow Share
Water desalination plants can effectively turn seawater into drinking water, but they're hardly portable. Now a team has created a salt-removing gadget so small that hundreds of them could fit onto a penny. If researchers can scale up this invention into a working device, it could generate up to a glass of fresh water per minute using about the same energy as a table lamp does. More
Next on CSI: Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy ScienceNews Share
Scientists have developed a quick and dusty method for detecting trace quantities of unknown substances. The new technique amounts to little more than sprinkling a layer of gold dust on the surface to be tested. Yet it will soon make one of science's most powerful but unwieldy chemical analysis methods useful for detecting trace amounts of materials such as explosives, drugs and environmental contaminants, the researchers who invented it say. More The 3D Invisibity Cloak: It's real, but it's really tiny Discover Magazine Share
It has become one of our favorite rituals: Researchers come out with a paper pushing the science of invisibility cloaks a little further, inspiring everyone to go giddy with visions of Harry Potter and Romulan Warbirds. The study in Science is another small step, but it's a crucial one. Scientists in Germany have created the first rudimentary "invisibility cloak" in 3D. More Large Hadron Collider triples its own record Wired Magazine Share
The Large Hadron Collider set a new record for the creation of energetic particle beams. The particle accelerator, which surpassed Fermilab's Tevatron in December as the baddest atom smasher of them all, smashed its own record, charging particles to 3.48 trillion electron volts. That's three times the energy of any beam ever created by human beings and just a shade under half the LHC's proposed maximum capabilities. More |
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