Aestus Ajith

Scientists have just found the first direct evidence that a mysterious phase of matter known as the “pseudogap” is standing in the way of high-temperature superconductivity For decades, scientists have been trying to achieve superconductivity - the ability for a material to carry a current with 100 percent efficiency - at high temperatures. Superconductivity has the potential to revolutionise pretty much everything that relies on electricity, such as computing, our electricity grid, and transport. Because an electrical current can travel through these materials with no resistance, it means they're incredibly efficient and extremely cost effective. But we've struggled to achieve superconductivity at practical temperatures. In the past, it was thought that superconductivity could only occur at close to absolute zero (around -273 degrees Celsius), but thankfully over the past couple of decades, scientists have managed to achieve superconductivity up to comparatively ...

Earth may seem like it has a lot of diversity, and I suppose that it does. There are organisms that are smaller than the tip of a needle, and there a few that are the  size of a building  (like the blue whale), or a person (like the  Nomura’s jellyfis h ) . But in truth, many things on our planet are really rather tame. At least, they are tame as far as our experiences go. Take temperature. This may vary by fifty degrees from winter to summer, give or take a little, but this really isn’t much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. For example, the hottest temperature, known as “Planck Temperature,” hits more than 100 million million million million million degrees, or 10 32  K. As it  has been noted , “You just can’t put this kind of temperature into perspective. There’s simply no way to wrap your head around this number. Saying that 10 32  K is hot is like saying that the universe occupies ...

There’s a fine line between being hailed as a visionary and being denounced as a crank, as Iraq-born physicist Jim Al-Khalili is only too aware. Seated in his office at the University of Surrey in the U.K. on a sunny day, he recalls a less tranquil time in his career, almost 15 years ago. Back then, he and his Surrey colleague, biologist Johnjoe McFadden, explored a strange mechanism to explain how DNA — the molecule that carries our genetic code — may mutate. Their theory caused a stir because it invoked quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the behavior of particles in the subatomic realm. Their idea gave some insight into the origins of genetic mutations, which over the centuries have given rise to the variety of species in the biological kingdom, and in the short term can lead to the development of diseases like cancer. The proposal was scoffed at, however, sparking incredulity from both biologists and physicists because quantum effects supposedly hold sway...

Spider silk is pretty amazing. It has the tensile strength of a  high-grade steel alloy , and about half that of the synthetic woven material,  Kevlar . It also has just a sixth of the density of steel, which means you could take a strand that’s long enough to wrap around the whole Earth, and  it’d weigh less than 500 grams . This quality means that spider silk would be five times as strong as the same weight of steel. And while we can’t take away from its incredible properties, we just might have to take away its title of ‘strongest natural material’, because researchers have figured out just how strong the teeth of  limpets , a type of marine snail, are. “Until now, we thought that spider silk was the strongest biological material because of its super-strength and potential applications in everything from bullet-proof vests to computer electronics,” lead author Asa Barber, from the School of Engineering at Portsmouth University in the UK,  said in a pr...

(Phys.org)—Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior. Quantum mechanics tells us that  light  can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL scientists have now been able to take the first ever snapshot of light behaving both as a wave and as a particle. The breakthrough work is published in  Nature Communications . When UV light hits a metal surface, it causes an emission of  electrons . Albert Einstein explained this "photoelectric" effect by proposing that light – thought to only be ...

Scientist Christopher Lavelle of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, together with a team of researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has successfully shown that boron-coated vitreous carbon foam can be used in the detection of neutrons emitted by radioactive materials—of critical importance to homeland security. Lavelle is lead author of the paper "Demonstration of Neutron Detection Utilizing Open Cell Foam and Noble Gas Scintillation" released today in the journal  Applied Physics Letters . Detecting  neutrons  is key to counterterrorism activities, such as screening cargo containers, as well as other vital applications in nuclear power instrumentation, workplace safety and industry. The demand for detectors has risen dramatically over the past decade while at the same time the usual detection material, helium-3, has become harder to obtain. An advantage of the approach outlined in the...

The components of our universe. Dark energy comprises 69% of the mass energy density of the universe, dark matter comprises 25%, and “ordinary” atomic matter makes up 5%. Three types of neutrinos make up at least 0.1%, the cosmic background radiation makes up 0.01%, and black holes comprise at least 0.005%. Credit: Science/AAAS It's a beautiful theory: the standard model of cosmology describes the universe using just six parameters. But it is also strange. The model predicts that dark matter and dark energy – two mysterious entities that have never been detected—make up 95% of the universe, leaving only 5% composed of the ordinary matter so essential to our existence. In an article in this week's  Science , Princeton astrophysicist David Spergel reviews how cosmologists came to be certain that we are surrounded by matter and energy that we cannot see. Observations of galaxies, supernovae, and the  universe 's temperature, among other things, have led researchers to co...

Move over, covalent and ionic bonds, there’s a new chemical bond in town, and it loves to shake things up.  It’s taken decades to nail down, but researchers in Canada have finally identified a new chemical bond, which they’re calling a ‘vibrational bond’. This vibrational bond seems to break the law of chemistry that states if you increase the temperature, the rate of reaction will speed up.  Back in 1989 , a team from the University of British Columbia investigated the reactions of various elements to muonium (Mu) - a strange, hydrogen isotope made up of an  antimuon  and an electron. They tried chlorine and fluorine with muonium, and as they increased the heat, the reaction time sped up, but when they tried bromine (br), a brownish-red toxic and corrosive liquid, the reaction time sped up as the temperature  decreased . The researchers,  Amy Nordrum writes for  Scientific American , "were flummoxed”.  Perhaps, thought one of the team...

When it comes to connectivity, unlike the fairly uniform brains of people without autism, the brains of people with autism are entirely unique. Each one functions with an idiosyncratic array of increased and reduced levels of connectivity, depending on where you look. In people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), no two brains are alike when it comes to connectivity between regions, scientists have found, which is in stark contrast to the relatively uniform way the brains of people without autism are arranged. This discovery was made by a team from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and could explain why some studies have found evidence that people affected by autism  have overly connected brains , while others have characterised ASD as the result of  reduced connections in several regions , both inside and outside of the  cortex.  The results of this new study could bring both findings together and uncover a new principal at play in the minds of ...

It’s considered one of the most important constants in the physical universe, but a new study has shown light doesn’t always travel at  light speed  inside a vacuum.  A new experiment conducted by optical physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland presents evidence that light pulses can be slowed down by manipulating their spatial structure.  The results of the study were  posted online at arXiv.org  before being  published  in Science , and suggest that light speed should be considered a maximum limit, rather than an invariable speed applicable to all forms of light passing through free space.  “The slowing is not great, in our specific case 0.001 percent,” principal investigator Miles Padgett  told ScienceAlert. “But that it exists at all disagrees with a simple but wrong notion that we have that light always goes at the same speed.”  “Previously people had recognised that the speed of light was complicated, ...

The world’s oldest continuous fire has been burning beneath an Australian mountain since around 4000 BC. You’ve probably heard of the coal seam gas fire that blazes uncontrollably beneath the now-abandoned town of  Centralia in Pennsylvania , US - the town that the creepy video game and film  Silent Hill  was based on. But, while it’s been disruptive, this fire has only been burning for the past 53 years - a relative blink of an eye when you consider that in Australia a similar blaze has been smouldering for an estimated 6,000 years, long before the country was settled by Europeans. Visible only as some foul-smelling steam, the coal seam blaze is contained 30 metres below the surface of Mount Wingen (which means “fire” in the local Aboriginal language) or Burning Mountain, located in the state of New South Wales. And it’s officially the oldest fire on the planet, that we know of at least. No one is sure what first ignited the coal seam fire, but according to ...