Category: Physics
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New force…
Everything in our Universe is held together or pushed apart by four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear interactions. Physicists now think they've spotted the actions of a fifth physical force emerging from a helium atom. It's not the first time researchers claim to have caught a glimpse of it, either. A few years…
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Benzene. Dimensions. Reality.
Nearly 200 years after the molecule was discovered by Michael Faraday, researchers have finally revealed the complex electronic structure of benzene. This not only settles a debate that has been raging since the 1930s, this step has important implications for the future development of opto-electronic materials, many of which are built on benzenes. The atomic…
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Changing geometry. Blurry lines…
Atomic interactions in everyday solids and liquids are so complex that some of these materials' properties continue to elude physicists' understanding. Solving the problems mathematically is beyond the capabilities of modern computers, so scientists at Princeton University have turned to an unusual branch of geometry instead. Researchers led by Andrew Houck, a professor of electrical…
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Colour. And shape…
There are hundreds of thousands of distinct colors and shapes that a person can distinguish visually, but how does the brain process all of this information? Scientists previously believed that the visual system initially encodes shape and color with different sets of neurons and then combines them much later. But a new study from Salk…
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Sensing atoms… So?
It sounds like an old-school vinyl record, but the distinctive crackle in the music streamed into Chris Holloway's laboratory is atomic in origin. The group at the National Institute for Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colorado, spent a long six years finding a way to directly measure electric fields using atoms, so who can blame them…
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