Physics Buzz

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to receive a handmade sweater as a gift, you likely spent more time than strictly necessary listening to its creator describing each of its virtues in detail: Look, it won’t stretch out under your arms! The weight of this yarn will make the sweater grow with you. Notice how closely knit it is to keep you warm!

During the cold of winter, the Swiss will often prepare a warm pot of fondue for supper. The famous melted cheese dish is traditionally made with grated cheese, white wine, a thickener like corn or potato starch and seasonings like garlic, pepper and nutmeg.

Most of us are familiar with the screeching noise packing tape makes when it's peeled off a box, as well as the frustration of failing to cleanly remove a label from a new purchase. It turns out that the jerky stop-and-go motion we experience when peeling tape occurs at a microscopic level as well.

Finding the next miracle material can be a tedious process. Thomas Edison and his fellow researchers famously tested thousands of materials before finding the right one for making lightbulb filaments . The search for superconductors, and in particular materials that can sustain superconductivity up to room temperature, is perhaps a modern-day equivalent.

Inspired by a technique first developed by botanists during the 1990s, materials scientists in the past few years have been making an almost oxymoronic-sounding material: transparent wood. While the biologists, who were studying the structure of wood, needed only small pieces, materials scientists have proposed applications like load-bearing windows and have focused on scaling up the technique.

You might think wrinkles are only skin deep, but there’s a lot more to the topic than anti-aging cream and laundry. The brain is a wrinkly object for a reason, as are flames , fingerprints, raisins, elephants, and the ridges in your teeth. Understanding how and why wrinkles emerge in developing biological organs like the brain could inform treatments for conditions like lissencephaly (the absence of wrinkles in the cerebral cortex), and possibly even diseases like Alzheimer’s and macular degeneration.

Researchers from MIT have come up with a new way to fabricate nanoscale structures using an innovative "shrinking" technique. The new method uses equipment many laboratories already have and is relatively straightforward, so it could make nanoscale fabrication more accessible.

Think back to your high-school biology class, where you learned about DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid is the building block of life. It is present in each of our cells and determines countless physical traits. But this incredibly complex molecule is impressive for another reason: single strands can spontaneously connect with each other to form the familiar double helix structure.

Sunlight is the power source for nearly all life on Earth, but it can be destructive, too. When too much radiation—particularly the heat rays of the near-infrared—hits manmade structures, it can cause them to overheat, warp , and even fracture.

Ice VII (or "ice-seven") is an exotic form of ice that grows so rapidly it could, under the right conditions, freeze an ocean-world's worth of water in just a few hours. A team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has recently uncovered the unusual process by which that freezing takes place. Their results were published in the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review Letters .

The crackle of wet rice puffs is more than snappy advertising strategy: Pouring milk into a bowl of cereal might help shed light on the collapse of ice shelves and dams of compacted earth, a new study finds.

Spider silk has been seen as "the material of the future"...for about 300 years now. Since the 1700s, people have been so anxious to harness its strength, durability, and flexibility that they’ve coordinated massive spider-catching operations, painstakingly harvested threads from hundreds of spiders in silk factories , and even genetically modified goats to produce it in their milk. We're wooed by images of Spiderman and giant helicopter-snaring nets, or bridges supported by pearly white cables stronger than steel. The New Yorker claims, “ In the Future, We’ll All Be Wearing Spider Silk ”. We love the stuff, even if making use of it has turned out to be a practical impossibility.

It’s called the Internet of Things —the collection of health trackers, household gadgets, smart phones, next-generation appliances, and other technologies that connect to the internet and transmit information. The “IoT” is changing our world. And if the predictions of tech experts are right, we’re only in the early stages of that revolution.

If you live in a part of the world with cold winters, you probably know the awful feeling that comes with an unexpectedly early frost or snow—one that covers your car in a layer of ice before you’ve pulled out your gloves and ice scraper for the season. The one that makes your fingers freeze in anticipation as you blast the defrost and pull out a credit card so that you can begin chipping away at the windshield.

Famous for raising hopes of riches beyond imagination—and then dashing them—the mineral pyrite is better known as fool’s gold . Its metallic yellow luster has fooled many over the years, with consequences that helped shape the modern world , along with the fortunes (and misfortunes) of individuals: According to one story, a fool got what he deserved by marrying a woman for the “hills of gold” on her land that—as you might have guessed—turned out to be hills of pyrite.

The biggest, brightest lasers make for good headlines, but this isn’t a story about those. This is a story about lasers so tiny you need a microscope just to see them—lasers smaller than red blood cells. These tiny lasers could play an important role in next-generation medical care (among other technologies), and that makes them a big deal.

There's an old one-liner: "Laser eye surgery isn't nearly as cool as it sounds". Now, I don't know if this is fair—in my opinion, blasting a person's cornea back into shape so that they can see without glasses is one of the most awesome applications of laser tech. But as cool as that is, it's still not as cool as a surgery that gives you the ability to shoot lasers from your eyes —something that may be on the horizon  thanks to researchers at Scotland's University of St. Andrews .

It’s a classic scene in action movies: The hero is dangling from a rope, staring down at certain death. Just as he starts climbing, a fiber snaps above his head. A suspenseful score swells as a hidden clock begins to count down until the final fiber breaks. We see another snap, and then another. Just in the nick of time, the hero lands safely on a ledge as the rope plummets into the depths.

According to folklore, earwigs like to crawl through the ears of sleeping humans, burrow into their brains, and lay eggs. Perhaps for this reason, or maybe because of their large rear-end pinchers, these insects tend to fall in the “creepy” category. Don’t be fooled through, earwigs are more sophisticated than they look: they're record-holders in the ancient art of origami.

Adam Shaw is still working toward his degree, but he’s also working toward the creation of next-gen materials that could change the world of modern manufacturing. A senior at Harvey Mudd College in California, Shaw is part of an international team of physicists and materials scientists whose research could hold the key to making an entirely new class of durable, lightweight alloys—mixtures of metals that can crystallize together to be greater than the sum of their parts.