Superfluids are among the most peculiar and counterintuitive of all materials. They have no viscosity, which allows an object travelling in a pure superfluid to move without friction. Similarly, they can flow effortlessly through narrow channels and pores that are virtually impermeable to conventional liquids. Superfluids are relatively rare and inaccessible, with only two known […]
Read article: Liquid hydrogen turns superfluid
Cosmologists have proposed that a mysterious substance called quintessence can explain why our universe is accelerating. But what is it made of?
Read article: Quintessence
Almost 40 years later, as the International Space Station takes shape, history is repeating itself. Of course, the space station has never been a scientific mission – its main purpose has always been to develop new technologies for space exploration, and latterly (and ironically given their history of competition in space) the United States has […]
Read article: Not the right stuff
The idea that the universe is trapped on a membrane in some high-dimensional space-time may explain why gravity is so weak, and could be tested at high-energy particle accelerators
Read article: The search for extra dimensions
Space station commander Bill Shepherd (US), Soyuz commander Yuri Gidzenko and flight engineer Sergei Krikalev have trained for four years in both Russia and the US in preparation for the expedition, which represents the first permanent human occupation of the space station. The crew is expecting a number of visitors over the next few months. […]
Read article: No space like home
Southwood received his PhD from Imperial College, London, in 1966 and was appointed as lecturer in the physics department in 1971, where he rose to become head of department in 1984. He studied the propagation of waves in the solar and terrestrial environment, joined the Galileo spacecraft team, and was also involved with the solar […]
Galindo-Uribarri and co-workers chose an isotope of neon with an energy structure that prevents it from emitting protons one at a time. This means that the two protons are certainly ejected simultaneously. The team fired a beam of radioactive fluorine ions at a proton-rich target to produce neon-18, which then decays into oxygen and two […]
Conventional magnetic recording works by changing the magnetisation states of different domains. An in-plane applied magnetic field takes a few nanoseconds to ‘switch’ the domain state. But Back and colleagues were surprised recently to find that a magnetic field applied perpendicular to a cobalt film can also flip magnetisation states (C H Back et al […]
Titan’s atmosphere has much in common with our own: it consists mainly of nitrogen, contains organic material, and exerts a pressure one-and-a half times what we feel on Earth. But Titan receives just 1% of the power that the Earth receives from the Sun. Griffith and co-workers believe that at such low temperatures, the methane […]
Although researchers have proposed a wide variety of explanations for sonoluminescence, they are in broad agreement that the oscillating bubbles reach very high temperatures. Until now, however, single-bubble sonoluminescence has been observed only from air bubbles trapped in water, although very weak emissions have been detected in some alcohols. Suslick and colleagues predicted the necessary […]
