Blog

Using a specially designed hot-water drill to cleanly bore through a half mile of ice, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded team of researchers has become the first ever to reach and sample the “grounding zone,” where Antarctic ice, land and sea all converge. Data gathered from samples of sediment taken in the grounding zone will provide clues about the mechanics of ice sheets and their potential effects on sea-level rise.

Knowing where agricultural land is located is crucial for regional and global food security planning, and information on field size offers valuable insight into local economic conditions. Two new global maps, released today in the journal Global Change Biology, provide a significant step forward in global cropland information on these two topics.

(Phys.org)—By wearing clothes that have been dip-coated in a silver nanowire (AgNW) solution that is highly radiation-insulating, a person may stay so warm in the winter that they can greatly reduce or even eliminate their need for heating their home. Considering that 47% of global energy is spent on indoor heating, and 42% of that specifically for residential heating, such highly insulating clothing could potentially have huge cost savings.

(Phys.org)—This year’s CES 2015 will draw technology watchers, including industry vendors, buyers and technology media; many in the media will be asked by their publications to keep their focus on booths and events representing the product mainstream—tablets, PCs, phones, smartwatches, automobile apps, connected home devices—avoiding distraction from displays of fun gadgets way out in futureland. We will need some disobedient media watchers, though, because some fun displays will introduce important breakthroughs and practical applications to come.

(Phys.org) —The ubiquitous van der Waals interaction – a consequence of quantum charge fluctuations – includes intermolecular forces such as attraction and repulsion between atoms, molecules and surfaces. The most long-range force acting between particles, it influences a range of phenomena including surface adhesion, friction and colloid stability.

In a world-first achievement, scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan, along with colleagues from the National Institute of Material Science and the University of Tokyo, have developed a new hydrogel whose properties are dominated by electrostatic repulsion, rather than attractive interactions.

(Phys.org)—It was an interesting week even as we entered the holiday season, researchers at MIT found that halting photons could lead to miniature particle accelerators and perhaps improved data transmission. The light trapping process discovered last year involved twisting the polarization direction now appears to be related to a wide range of other seemingly unrelated phenomena

In a new paper accepted by the journal Astroparticle Physics, Robert Ehrlich, a recently retired physicist from George Mason University, claims that the neutrino is very likely a tachyon or faster-than-light particle. There have been many such claims, the last being in 2011 when the “OPERA” experiment measured the speed of neutrinos and claimed they travelled a tiny amount faster than light

An hours-long Internet outage Tuesday in one of the world’s least-wired countries was probably more inconvenient to foreigners than to North Korean residents, most of whom have never gone online. Even for wired Koreans south of the heavily armed border separating the rivals, the temporary outage made little difference—southerners are banned by law from accessing North Korean websites.