All Stories by Peter Weiss
- Physics
Doppler Toppler: Experiment upends normal frequency shift
The expected drop in frequency of a signal from a receding source—the Doppler effect—becomes a frequency increase when a high-current electric pulse creates extraordinary electromagnetic conditions in a web of electrical components.
- Tech
Wings of Change
Inspired by the Wright brothers, who steered their first flyer by twisting its pliant wings, engineers are developing versatile and flexible flying machines expected to undergo radical shape changes in flight.
- Tech
Electronic Thread: Fiber transistor may lead to woven circuits
By coating flexible metal fibers with semiconductors, researchers have developed individual threads that act as transistors and that should be linkable into circuits by means of wires included among a fabric's threads.
- Physics
Quantum Pileup: Ultracold molecules meld into oneness
Scientists have for the first time transformed molecules into an exotic state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
- Physics
Humpty-Dumpty Effect: Acoustically, people resemble large eggs
The first measurements of how people intrinsically scatter sound waves indicate that, acoustically, a human body resembles a hard ellipsoid of the same height and girth as the person.
- Tech
Laser beam powers flying machine
Caught in a laser's glare on its maiden launch, a lightweight drone with a solar panel demonstrated that continuous flight powered by ground-based lasers is possible.
- Physics
New type of material that heat can’t bloat
A newfound material exhibits the desirable property of not expanding when heated over a wide temperature range, but from an apparent cause never seen before—electrons changing positions inside the new compound's crystal structure.
- Physics
A Spin through Space-Time
After 40 years of preparation, satellite Gravity Probe B is scheduled to launch next month and test the prediction that massive bodies, such as Earth, twist space itself as they rotate.
- Physics
Super Spinner: Seven-atom speck acts like superfluid
Scientists have for the first time directly observed the onset in liquid helium of superfluidity—a quantum-mechanical state in which liquids flow without friction—as helium atoms accumulated one by one to form a droplet of liquid around a gas molecule.
- Tech
Sweet-toothed microbe tapped for power
Using a newly discovered bacterium that both frees electrons from sugars and injects those charges straight into electric circuits, scientists have created a fuel cell that converts carbohydrates to electricity with extraordinary efficiency.
- Physics
New Quarktet: Subatomic oddity hints at pentaparticle family
Evidence for the second particle ever found to include five of the fundamental building blocks known as quarks and antiquarks suggests that a whole family of such so-called pentaquarks exists.
- Humans
Nobel prizes go to scientists harnessing odd phenomena
The 2003 Nobel prizes in the sciences were announced early this week.
