All Stories by Peter Weiss
- Materials Science
Melt-Resistant Metals: Carbon coating keeps atoms in order
Shrink-wrapped in carbon, nanoscale metal chunks melt at extraordinarily high temperatures, suggesting carbon coatings as a route to higher heat resistance for materials and devices.
- Physics
Crystal Bash: Shocking changes to light’s properties
Prized, light-manipulating microstructures known as photonic crystals may transform light in new and technologically tantalizing ways when jolted by shock waves.
- Physics
Seeking the Mother of All Matter
World's mightiest particle collider may transform less-than-nothing into a primordial something.
- Physics
Not even bismuth-209 lasts forever
Touted in textbooks as the heaviest stable, naturally occurring isotope, bismuth-209 actually does decay but with an astonishingly long half-life of 19 billion billion years.
- Tech
Tipping tiny scales
A prototype detector based on a tiny silicon cantilever that operates in air has achieved a 1,000-fold sensitivity boost when measuring tiny quantities of chemical agents.
- Computing
Minding Your Business
By means of novel sensors and mathematical models, scientists are teaching the basics of human social interactions to computers, which should ease the ever-expanding collaboration between people and machines.
- Physics
To pack a strand tight, make it a helix
The optimal way to pack long strings into small spaces is to coil them into helices—particularly the types of helices found in proteins and perhaps DNA.
- Materials Science
Blunt Answer: Cracking the puzzle of elastic solids’ toughness
Rubbery materials prove tougher than theory predicts because cracks trying to penetrate those stretchy materials grow blunt at their tips.
- Physics
Answer blows in wind, swirls in soap
A swirling soap film gives new clues to how turbulent flows, such as the circulation of Earth's atmosphere, squander their energy.
- Tech
Nanotechnologists get a squirt gun, almost
A novel computer simulation of molecular behavior suggests that a minuscule squirt gun able to spit liquids a few hundred nanometers ought to work.
- Materials Science
Between the Sheets: In reactors and nanotubes, errant atoms get a grip
A new computer simulation predicts that neutron irradiation of graphite displaces atoms and bonds in unexpected ways.
- Physics
Fusion device crosses threshold
By sparking thermonuclear reactions, a machine called Z has joined the big leagues among potential technologies for producing power from controlled nuclear fusion.
