Physicists have a pretty good idea of what to expect when friction and adhesion occur in the visible world. You jam on the brakes, for instance, and your tires and the highway interact to stop your car. You glue two pieces of wood together, and they stick.
But how slippery or sticky are things that are too small to see? When solid surfaces no more than a thousand atoms across brush past each other, will they respond like the rubber and the road? Will they adhere like the wood and the glue?
Scientists are fascinated by a dark, lake-like feature recently observed on Saturn’s moon Titan. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured a series of images showing a marking, darker than anything else around it. It is remarkably lake-like, with smooth, shore-like boundaries unlike any seen previously on Titan.
“I’d say this is definitely the best candidate we’ve seen so far for a liquid hydrocarbon lake on Titan,” said Dr. Alfred McEwen, Cassini imaging team member and
The dry, dusty, treeless expanse of Chile’s Atacama Desert is the most lifeless spot on the face of the Earth, and that’s why Alison Skelley and Richard Mathies joined a team of NASA scientists there earlier this month.
The University of California, Berkeley, scientists knew that if the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA) they’d built could detect life in that crusty, arid land, then it would have a good chance some day of detecting life on the planet Mars.
In a place that ha
Astronomers at Australia’s national radio and optical observatories will watch as a probe released from a spacecraft slams into a comet about 133 million km away at a speed of nearly 37,000 km/h (10.2 km per second).
The cosmic demolition derby takes place about 4pm AEST on 4 July when the comet, Tempel 1, will be most easily seen from the mid-Pacific. The 370 kg probe, carried by NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft, has been travelling toward the comet for 173 days and has
Recent research results by two physicists from the Niels Bohr Institute at University of Copenhagen, Thomas Heimburg and Andrew D. Jackson, cast doubt on the generally accepted theory of nerve activity. Their new theory of how nerves function emphasizes the essential role that temperature and pressure play in nerves. This result can contribute to a better understanding of the effect of drugs on nerve activity and will be published in the presitigous American journal Proceedings of the National Acad
The Six Parties of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) consortium have reached a decision in their negotiations, specifying the location of the world’s first energy-producing fusion reactor in Cadarache, in Southern France. The €10 billion project will generate multiple research opportunities for the Plasma Physics Research Centre at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
ITER’s future location in Cadarache will be doubly beneficial to EPFL.
A research team from the Public University of Navarra has started a study of the design and development of absorbent materials that enable the storage of hydrogen, a clean fuel that can be used as an alternative to those derived from fossil fuels, such as petrol and diesel. The storage of this element is, in fact, a key process in the change over from internal combustion engines – contaminating and not very efficient, to cars with hydrogen fuel cells.
The project, entitled, De
In a dress rehearsal for the rendezvous between NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft and comet 9P/Tempel 1, the Hubble Space Telescope captured dramatic images of a new jet of dust streaming from the icy comet.
The images are a reminder that Tempel 1’s icy nucleus, roughly the size of central Paris, is dynamic and volatile. Astronomers hope the eruption of dust seen in these observations is a preview of the fireworks that may come 4 July, when a probe from the Deep Impact spacecraft w
Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created the first example of a high-temperature superfluid: a new state of matter in which the atoms in a gas can move with no friction or slowing down whatsoever.
Reported in the June 23 issue of journal Nature, the work is closely related to the superconductivity of electrons in metals. According to Wolfgang Ketterle, the Nobel laureate who heads the MIT group, observations of superfluids may help solve lingering questio
For scientists who want to discern the complex chemistry at work in Earth’s atmosphere, detecting a particular gas molecule can be as hard as finding a proverbial needle in a haystack.
Frank De Lucia, professor of physics at Ohio State University , and his colleagues recently used their FAST Scan Submillimeter Spectroscopy Technique (FASSST) to make the job easier.
The technique offers a way for scientists to examine the spectrum of light given off by a molecule. E
Qualities of granular materials provide insight into both nature and industry
In separate papers appearing in this week’s Nature, researchers announce findings regarding the little-understood world of granular materials, systems of particles that can dictate the flow of avalanches, the quality of concrete and even the mixing of pharmaceuticals.
In both studies, the researchers developed new analytical tools that combine laboratory simulators with advanced computer simu
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered a tiny biological structure that is highly electrically conductive. This breakthrough helps describe how microorganisms can clean up groundwater and produce electricity from renewable resources. It may also have applications in the emerging field of nanotechnology, which develops advanced materials and devices in extremely small dimensions.
The findings of microbiologist Derek R. Lovley’s research team are pu
On 9 June, a powerful new 35-metre antenna, presently undergoing acceptance testing at Cebreros, Spain, successfully picked up signals and tracked Rosetta and SMART-1. It is ESA’s second deep-space ground station in its class and adds Ka-band reception capability and high pointing precision to the ESTRACK network.
Construction of the new ground station, located in the Spanish province of Avila, has proceeded in record time. Procurement activities started in February 2003, and
British astronomers today (June 24th) saw the first images from an ambitious new programme of discovery, the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS). The survey will scour the sky with the world’s most powerful infrared survey camera ( WFCAM) to find some of the dimmest and most distant objects in the Universe. UKIDSS will reach at least twenty times deeper than the largest current survey conducted at this wavelength. Infrared light can be used to study objects that are not hot enough to sh
MARSIS, the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding on board ESA’s Mars Express orbiter, is now fully deployed, has undergone its first check-out and is ready to start operations around the Red Planet.
With this radar, the Mars Express orbiter at last has its full complement of instruments available to probe the planet’s atmosphere, surface and subsurface structure.
MARSIS consists of three antennas: two ‘dipole’ booms 20 metres long, and one 7-metre ‘mo
It is difficult to imagine modern life without plastics. Look around you, they are everywhere: pens, PC’s, lenses, furniture, etc. They are cheap, long-lasting and light and, moreover, they have good mechanical, thermal and dielectric properties, to such an extent that they have replaced wood, metal or glass in many applications. The polysulphone, phenoxyl or polycarbonate thermoplastics studied in this thesis are highly resistant (the last one being used for car fenders), ductile and flexible.
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