Friday, 25 May, 2012

Pitching the biomechanics The fate of baseball teams valued at hundreds of millions of dollars and followed by millions of rabid fans can come down to the elbow ligaments of a handful of young men who can throw a ball nearly 100 mph. But that doesn’t mean the best science guides their training.
Thursday, May 17th, 2012

Dunewatching, Martian style

New pix from Mars show sand dunes on the move. Mars has been dry for 1.5 billion years; could massive erosion be due to wind? Yes, says a new report that tracked dunes with precise new images. Surprise: dunes move as fast on Mars as on Earth!

Thursday, May 10th, 2012

Reading magma, predicting giant eruptions

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.

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Chasing neutrinos at the South Pole

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.

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

The importance of being Einstein

Experiment finds Earth “dragging” spacetime, as Einstein predicted. Einstein knew his physics. Bending light, gravity lenses, shifting spacetime, spinning neutron stars: he called them all.

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

Spider silk: Material of the future?

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.

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Double the bubble!

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?

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Pop goes the super supernova

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!

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Nanotech

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.

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

New battery technology allows fast charge and discharge

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?

Thursday, March 12th, 2009