Wednesday, 8 February, 2012

Volcanic eruptions are unpredictable, but here’s a new view of the historic eruption of a Mediterranean monster. About 3,500 years ago, Santorini’s eruption left a giant caldera and 60-meter layers of pumice. A new study of tiny crystals tracks the movement of molten magma before the cataclysm.

Neutrinos are odd: Extremely difficult to see, they travel through mass with scarcely a trace. A 1-billion ton detector in South Pole ice is now counting neutrinos, intent on understanding their origin and role in the universe, and even spotting echoes of the Big Bang.

Experiment finds Earth “dragging” spacetime, as Einstein predicted. For 100+ years, scientists have been proving that Einstein knew his physics. Bending light, gravity lenses, shifting spacetime, spinning neutron stars: Einstein called them all. If so many top physicists are brilliant, why do we keep coming back to Einstein?

Strong, tough, sticky, elastic and biodegradable, silk may be used for a mesh to support injured tissues, or as a temporary container for drugs, stem cells and growth factors. As scientists divine the secret of how spiders and silkworms make silk, they are finding ways to engineer silk into medical devices.

High-speed movies of popping bubbles show a ring of “daughter” bubbles forming around the edge. A close look reveals a third generation of “granddaughter” bubbles. How does this happen? Does this matter to real-world medicine and climatology? And can we get paid to play with bubbles?

Titanic explosion shows one of the biggest bangs since the Biggest Bang, spreads useful elements through the universe. Finally revealed: anti-matter is working for you!

Adding nanotubes makes a stronger plastic, but adding several nano-structures greatly increases the benefit, according to a new study from India. Read about the frontier of material science.

By tweaking the conventional recipe, researchers have sped up electricity movement in a lithium battery by 100X. Want to charge your electric car in minutes or your phone in seconds?

Oils in spent coffee grounds are easily converted into biodiesel — a renewable source of transportation energy. Bottoms up for CofFuel?

Biology operates on the nanometer scale, and now ultra-small technology is producing monster benefits for genetic analysis, cell biologists, and the treatment of blinding glaucoma.