news 2013

Scientists have broken new ground in the study of deep earthquakes, a poorly understood phenomenon that occurs when tectonics drive the oceanic crust under continental plates. This research is a large step toward replicating the full power of these earthquakes—to learn what sets them off and how they unleash their power off the coasts of the western United States, Russia and Japan.

Using low-frequency laser pulses, a team of researchers has carried out the first measurements that reveal the detailed characteristics of a unique kind of magnetism found in a mineral called herbertsmithite.

Astronomers have discovered enormous smooth shapes that look like vapour trails in a gigantic galaxy cluster. These 'arms' span half a million light years and provide researchers with clues to a billion years of collisions within the "giant cosmic train wreck" of the Coma cluster. Coma is like a giant cosmic train wreck where several clusters have collided with each other.

At the Vienna University of Technology, a new class of thermoelectric materials has been discovered. Due to a surprising physical effect they can be used to create electricity more efficiently. A lot of energy is wasted when machines turn hot, unnecessarily heating up their environment. Some of this thermal energy could be harvested using thermoelectric materials; they create electric current when they are used to bridge hot and cold objects.

A cheap and simple process using natural fibers embedded with nanoparticles can almost completely rid water of harmful textile dyes in minutes, report Cornell and Colombian researchers who worked with native Colombian plant fibers. Dyes, such as indigo blue used to color blue jeans, threaten waterways near textile plants in South America, India and China.

At some point in elementary school you were shown that opposite charges attract and like charges repel. This is a universal scientific truth - except when it isn't. A research team led by Berkeley Lab chemist Richard Saykally and theorist David Prendergast, working at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), has shown that, when hydrated in water, positively charged ions (cations) can actually pair up with one another.

MIT researchers have found a new family of materials that provides the best-ever performance in a reaction called oxygen evolution, a key requirement for energy storage and delivery systems such as advanced fuel cells and lithium-air batteries. The materials, called double perovskites, are a variant of a mineral that exists in abundance in the Earth's crust.

Reliable quantum computing would make it possible to solve certain types of extremely complex technological problems millions of times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers. Other types of problems that quantum computing could tackle would not even be feasible with today's fastest machines.

The science of how rubbing a balloon on a woolly jumper creates an electric charge may help to explain how volcanoes generate lightning. Volcanic plumes play host to some of the most spectacular displays of lightning on the planet but, whilst there are many theories, the exact mechanisms behind these natural light shows, and why some volcanoes see more lightning than others, are a mystery.

A technique developed to identify a new rare element can now be used to 'fingerprint' and identify other rare elements in the future. The international team of researchers, led by Sweden's Lund University, and including nuclear physicists from the University of Liverpool, funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), have confirmed the existence of an extremely rare 'superheavy' element that was first proposed by Russian researchers in 2004, but had not been proven.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated a new mechanism for extracting energy from light, a finding that could improve technologies for generating electricity from solar energy and lead to more efficient optoelectronic devices used in. Dawn Bonnell , Penn's vice provost for research and Trustee Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science , led the work, along with David Conklin, a doctoral student.

Researchers in Vienna develop new imaging technique to study the function of entire nervous systems Scientists at the Campus Vienna Biocenter (Austria) have found a way to overcome some of the limitations of light microscopy. Applying the new technique, they can record the activity of a worm's brain with high temporal and spatial resolution, ultimately linking brain anatomy to brain function.

Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology manage to study the physics that connect the classical the quantum world. How does a classical temperature form in the quantum world? An experiment at the Vienna University of Technology has directly observed the emergence and the spreading of a temperature in a quantum system.

04 Sep 2013 Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO's New Technology Telescope to explore more than 100 planetary nebulae in the central bulge of our galaxy. They have found that butterfly-shaped members of this cosmic family tend to be mysteriously aligned — a surprising result given their different histories and varied properties.

The evolution of similar traits in different species, a process known as convergent evolution, is widespread not only at the physical level, but also at the genetic level, according to new research led by scientists at Queen Mary University of London and published in Nature this week. The scientists investigated the genomic basis for echolocation, one of the most well-known examples of convergent evolution to examine the frequency of the process at a genomic level.

A surprising low-tech tool—Scotch Magic tape—was one of the keys to the discovery MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (09/03/2013) —An international group of researchers from the University of Minnesota, Argonne National Laboratory and Seoul National University have discovered a groundbreaking technique in manufacturing nanostructures that has the potential to make electrical and optical devices smaller and better than ever before.

An international team of researchers at Vienna University of Technology in Austria and at Princeton University in the USA has confirmed theoretically-predicted interactions between single oxygen molecules and crystalline titanium dioxide. The results, which could be of importance for a variety of applications, have been published in the current.

Remember the periodic table from chemistry class in school? Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have presented fresh evidence that confirms the existence of a previously unknown chemical element. The new, super-heavy element has yet to be named. An international team of researchers, led by physicists from Lund University, have confirmed the existence of what is considered a new element with atomic number 115.

Understanding what happens to a material as it undergoes phase transformations - changes from a solid to a liquid to a gas or a plasma - is of fundamental scientific interest and critical for optimizing commercial applications. For metal nanocrystals, assumptions about the size-dependence of phase transformations were made that now need to be re-evaluated.

When he came to Yale in July, Karsten Heeger was already a familiar figure in particle physics, especially for his work on low-energy neutrinos. As expected, the new director of Yale's Wright Laboratory is already working to broaden and intensify the University's research into some of the universe's most mysterious components.