All Stories by Peter Weiss
- Tech
Wee wires that can crawl
Self-propelled strands of a muscle protein coated with gold offer a way to arrange and control the nanoworld.
- Materials Science
Anyone want to knit a microscopic sweater?
Microscopic polymer tubes can tangle themselves into a new and possibly useful structure—tiny "yarn balls" that flatten out and partly unravel in an electric field.
- Physics
Graphite in Flatland: Carbon sheets may rival nanotubes
Researchers have created freestanding carbon films as thin as one atom.
- Physics
Dancing the heat away
By laser-zapping nanocapsules of water, scientists find that the specific molecular motions caused by the excitation, not just simple heat diffusion, determine how energy and heat flow through such minuscule structures.
- Physics
Tiny tubes tune in colors
At the right length and conductivity, ultrathin filaments of carbon known as carbon nanotubes can receive visible light waves in the same the way as larger antennas receive radio signals.
- Tech
Cramming bits into pits
By skewing the alignment of pits on an optical disk's surface, disk makers might store much more than one bit per pit.
- Physics
An electron ruler gauges crystal flaws
Electrons ricocheting through a crystal now make it possible for scientists to discern shifts in crystal lattices as small as a hundredth of an atom's width.
- Physics
To freeze this liquid, add heat
A wrong-headed mixture of liquid starch, water, and a solvent freezes when heated.
- Physics
Hurrying a nuclear identity switch
Radioactive beryllium-7 atoms locked inside molecular cages decay extraordinarily quickly.
- Physics
Wake Up, Little Surfers: Riding waves toward tabletop accelerators
Prospects that today's giant particle accelerators could shrink to the size of rooms look better than ever, now that new experiments have produced electron pulses of uniform energy from laser-powered accelerators that act over millimeter distances.
- Physics
Marrying matter and light
Physicists have created circuit components that, in a manner analogous to atoms, meld with light, opening new ways to study fundamental light-matter interactions.
- Physics
Spooky Timing: Quantum-linked photons coordinate clock ticks
Physicists have demonstrated a new technique for bringing distant clocks into closer synchronization by means of entangled photons whose quantum properties are mysteriously correlated.
