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A new technique developed by MIT physicists could someday provide a way to custom-design multilayered nanoparticles with desired properties, potentially for use in displays, cloaking systems, or biomedical devices. It may also help physicists tackle a variety of thorny research problems, in ways that could in some cases be orders of magnitude faster than existing methods.

Genetic data suggest there was a collapse in male, but not female, genetic diversity starting 7,000 years ago. The reason may be wars between clans structured around male ancestry. Starting about 7,000 years ago, something weird seems to have happened to men: Over the next two millennia, recent studies suggest, their genetic diversity -specifically, the diversity of their Y chromosomes - collapsed.

The rise of self-driving cars is set to dramatically alter the way we move around cities in the future. In particular, private car ownership is expected to shift toward shared mobility services, with vehicle fleet operators offering on-demand transportation. This should help to reduce traffic in urban areas and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Using detailed computer simulations, Oxford University research has revealed why falcons dive at their prey using the same steering laws as man-made missiles. Published today in PLOS Computational Biology, researchers from Oxford's Department of Zoology use computer simulations of peregrine falcon attacks to show that the extreme speeds reached during dives from high altitudes enhance the raptors' ability to execute manoeuvres needed to successfully attack agile prey that would otherwise escape.

As a single raindrop falls to the ground, it can splash back up in a crown-like sheet, spraying smaller droplets from its rim before sinking back to the surface - all in the blink of an eye. Now researchers at MIT have found a way to track the thickness of a droplet's rim as it splashes up from a variety of surfaces.

The human heart can be viewed as both a mechanical and an electrical device - one that contracts and pumps billions of times over an average lifespan. How does it manage to achieve this feat without lapsing into dangerous irregularities? New research by McGill University scientists finds that the answer lies in the particular geometry of the muscle fibres of the heart wall.

Observing the world's oceans is increasingly a mission assigned to autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) - marine robots that are designed to drift, drive, or glide through the ocean without any real-time input from human operators. Critical questions that AUVs can help to answer are where, when, and what to sample for the most informative data, and how to optimally reach sampling locations.

In even the most fuel-efficient cars, about 60 percent of the total energy of gasoline is lost through heat in the exhaust pipe and radiator. To combat this, researchers are developing new thermoelectic materials that can convert heat into electricity. These semiconducting materials could recirculate electricity back into the vehicle and improve fuel efficiency by up to 5 percent.

The physics involved with stirring a liquid operate the same way as the mathematical functions that secure digital information. This parallel could help in developing even more secure ways of protecting digital information. Fluid dynamics is not something that typically comes to mind when thinking about bitcoin.

In past negotiations aimed at reducing the arsenals of the world's nuclear superpowers, chiefly the U.S. and Russia, a major sticking point has been the verification process: How do you prove that real bombs and nuclear devices - not just replicas - have been destroyed, without revealing closely held secrets about the design of those weapons? Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a clever solution, which in effect serves as a physics-based version of the cryptographic keys used in computer encryption systems.

Using detailed computer simulations, Oxford University research has revealed why falcons dive at their prey using the same steering laws as man-made missiles. Published today in PLOS Computational Biology, researchers from Oxford's Department of Zoology use computer simulations of peregrine falcon attacks to show that the extreme speeds reached during dives from high altitudes enhance the raptors' ability to execute manoeuvres needed to successfully attack agile prey that would otherwise escape.

An academic paper involving University of Queensland authors has been retracted after the researchers found errors in the computer code used to analyse some of the data. The paper, titled "A mathematical model explains saturating axon guidance responses to molecular gradients", was published in the journal eLife on 2 February 2016.

Drastic wing failure, as shown in the above illustration, would probably result in irreparable damage to an unmanned aerial vehicle. Learning must start and finish within a single execution. But, the newly proposed vehicle would have more than just sparse data at its disposal.

This one simple mathematical trick can accurately predict the shape and melting effects of ponds on Arctic sea ice, according to new research by UChicago scientists. The study , published April 4 in Physical Review Letters by researchers with UChicago and MIT , should help climate scientists improve models of climate change and perhaps plug a gap between scientific predictions and observations over the past decade, they said.

Scientists at Cern say their NA62 experiment has observed what may be an ultra-rare charged kaon decay. The NA62 experiment is a particle physics experiment at CERN using a 400 GeV proton beam from the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) accelerator. The UK has played a leading role in both the detector construction for NA62 and the data analysis and production of results, with Dr Giuseppe Ruggiero from Lancaster University as the Physics Coordinator.

By Birgit Baustädter Biomechanical engineer Justyna Niestrawska investigates the mechanical behaviour of the aorta at TU Graz and represents it using mathematical formulas. And wins the German Aorta Prize while doing so. What has mechanical engineering got in common with the human body? Can you explain biological processes like the operations of a machine? The biomechanical engineer Justyna Niestrawska can answer these questions - straight out of her daily work.

TU Wien and Sandoz GmbH have successfully implemented a real-time computer simulation of the complex growth behaviour of penicillin producing organisms. This simulation now helps to keep the production process under control. For thousands of years, micro-organisms have been used to facilitate chemical reactions - in beer brewing, for example.

How fast could a new flu epidemic spread? The results of the UK's largest citizen science project of its kind ever attempted, carried out by thousands of volunteers, predict that 43 million people in the UK could be infected in an influenza pandemic, and with up to 886,000 of those infected expected to be fatalities.

A next-generation X-ray beamline now operating at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) brings together a unique set of capabilities to measure the properties of materials at the nanoscale. Called COSMIC, for Coherent Scattering and Microscopy, this X-ray beamline at Berkeley Lab's Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) allows scientists to probe working batteries and other active chemical reactions, and to reveal new details about magnetism and correlated electronic materials.

For centuries, scientists and scholars have measured the influence of individuals and discoveries through citations, a crude statistic subject to biases, politics and other distortions. A new paper led by the Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago describes a different way to keep score in science-a more direct measure of how influential ideas ripple out across scholarship and culture.