All Stories by Peter Weiss
- Materials Science
Better-Built Diamonds: Fast growth, purity may multiply uses
A research group has fabricated the purest diamonds ever made or found, and another has devised a way to grow high-quality diamonds up to 100 times faster than typical growth rates.
- Physics
Electron spins pass imposing frontier
Electron spins crossed from one semiconductor to another with apparent ease and little or no mussing of their direction, suggesting that sandwiches of materials common in microcircuits are no obstacle to creating spin-information channels in future circuits.
- Physics
Glass may magnify ultrasmall-world oddities
A puzzling and unexpected response to magnetic fields suggests that certain glasses may exhibit a type of large-scale quantum mechanical behavior never seen before.
- Physics
Bitty Beacon: Wee disks probe materials at microscales
Illuminated by lasers, disks no larger than red blood cells can project rotating beams bright enough to create a light show in a darkened room.
- Physics
Superconductor has odd electron pairing
Although electrons pair up in many superconductors, there's one in which they join together in two different ways, new calculations confirm.
- Physics
Clues to exotic particles found again
Although a correction to theory last year watered down its results, further analysis of a muon experiment still provides hints of new subatomic particles.
- Tech
Pocket Sockets
Keenly aware of user frustration with the short-lived batteries in cell phones and other portable electronics, researchers are rushing to work out the bugs in tiny fuel-cell power plants that will be as small as batteries—but last a lot longer and be refuelable.
- Tech
Electronics in the Round: Mixing plastic and silicon yields form-fitting circuitry
Investigators used ordinary integrated-circuit fabrication techniques to pattern arrays of silicon-based transistors onto a flat, deformable sheet of plastic.
- Physics
Manhandled molecules, midget memories
A thick coating of organic chemicals can record information at densities potentially a million times greater than is possible with current compact disk technology.
- Materials Science
A Cut above the Ordinary: Low-tech machining yields coveted nanostructure
A new finding that machining of metals imparts a hard, fine-grained structure to turnings and other scraps may lead to less costly but more durable parts for cars and other applications.
- Physics
Violent chemistry saps sonobubble energy
In liquids agitated by sound waves, imploding gas bubbles get cooled when atoms recombine, making the bubbles unlikely nuclear reactors.
- Tech
Micromachine runs on nuclear power
Radioactivity creates electric fields that wiggle a tiny lever.
