Zhang and colleagues found that the filaments – which are several centimetres long – have two distinct stable states depending on their length. Below a certain threshold the filament stret...
Read article: Flying the flag for fluid dynamics
Using data from the Chandra satellite, the young scientists pinpointed an X-ray source in the supernova remnant known as IC443 and asked the National Radio Astronomy Laboratory for data from the VLA t...
Read article: Star high-school students find pulsar
Earlier studies used simplistic models that assume human cells are spherical. But many cells – for example, muscular and red blood cells – are not spherical. Sebastián’s team th...
The JIF scheme was set up in 1998 by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust – the world’s largest biomedical research charity – to provide much-needed funding for university labora...
Pulsars are rotating neutron stars that emit radiation, which is seen from Earth as a series of highly regular pulses. Anomalous x-ray pulsars (AXPs) are not, however, powered like most pulsars. AXPs ...
Read article: The pulsar’s powerhouse
Researchers at the laboratory first created a superconducting tape five years ago. They used a process known as Ion Beam Assisted Deposition (IBAD) to create a film of the ceramic superconductor yttri...
One of the key questions in planetary science is whether the early climate of Mars was warm enough for liquid water – and hence extraterrestrial life – to exist. The layered rocks, thought...
Read article: Martian sedimentary rocks suggest a watery past
Carbon-60 is in a class of organic materials known as fullerenes, which are insulators. Scientists first generated superconductivity – current flow without resistance below a certain ‘tran...
Rocks from space have had a bad press recently. The action movies Armageddon and Deep Impact explored what would happen if the Earth was threatened by a huge asteroid impact. Somewhat more down...
Read article: Rock blasts in from the past
Louis Néel was born in Lyons in 1904 and dedicated his career to the study of magnetism. In 1932 he discovered antiferromagnetism – a form of magnetism in which the ‘spins’ on n...
