Applied Physics

As I was sitting patiently in Long Beach waiting to exit the plane and listening to that weird sawing sound that I hear every time I fly on an Airbus A320, I was wondering two things: 1) Why does it…

In the world of alternative fuels, there may be nothing greener than pond scum. Algae are tiny biological factories that use photosynthesis to transform carbon dioxide and sunlight into energy so…

As lithographic materials and strategies come close to fundamental technical limits, increase performance and size could become prohibitively expensive. Further advances will require a new approach…

What do a tree and the Eiffel Tower have in common? According to a Duke University engineer, both are optimized for 'flow.' In the case of trees, the flow is of water from the ground throughout the…

A multidisciplinary team at the University of Reading has developed a robot which is controlled by a biological brain formed from cultured neurons. This cutting edge research is the first step to…

On the vast CERN landscape outside Geneva, there’s only one figure in science tilting at the LHC windmill, Dr Otto E Rössler(Roessler). An aged veteran with some 300 research papers under his belt,…

Researchers testing the long-held theory that therapeutic massage can speed recovery after a sports injury have found early scientific evidence of the healing effects of massage. The scientists have…

ScientificBlogger Matthew Brown had the chance to sit down with Professor Meg Urry, the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University. She gives readers a special understanding…

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have for the first time engineered 3-D materials that can reverse the natural direction of visible and near-infrared light, a development that…

The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that as the temperature of a pure substance moves toward absolute zero (the mathematically lowest temperature possible) its entropy, or the disorderly behavior…