Going with the flow
Small-scale liquid effects speed up micro-fluid devices
Sonic crystals make the sound barrier
The crystals themselves are constructed from lead balls 1 cm in diameter, coated with a 2.5-mm layer of silicone rubber, and placed inside an epoxy matrix. The strong periodic variation in density cre...
Physics, polymers and pesticides
Physicists have studied the interaction of water with surfaces for centuries. Felix Savart, for instance, first studied shocks in shallow water in 1833. It is now well known that the maximum diameter ...
New insights into surfaces
Berndt and co-workers prepared gold, silver and copper surfaces with standard techniques and then used a scanning tunnelling microscope with a specially prepared tungsten tip to identify regions on th...
Snooker moves to the atomic scale
Scanning tunnelling microscopes (STMs) rely on an ultrafine ‘tip’ to push atoms over a surface. The atoms are pushed either by the tip itself, or by an electric field. The new technique re...
Physics in a bubble
The MIT team injected small quantities of air into a highly viscous liquid to stimulate the formation of air bubbles. As the bubbles reached the surface, da Silveira and colleagues punctured them with...
Polymer lasers without mirrors
The waveguide structure was created by pouring a mixture of copolymer solution and molecular laser dye into a mould situated on top of a silicon wafer. The solution was allowed to solidify over 12 hou...
Whatever happened to cold fusion?
Some researchers remain adamant that cold fusion is real, as David Voss reports
A ‘sticky’ theory
The French team studied the behaviour of air bubbles on the surface of the sticky polymer film attached to a metal probe. The number and size of the bubbles depends on the surface roughness of the fil...
Physics, biscuits and the public
Scientists often complain that the media do not report their work. However, according to Fisher, this is not because journalists are not interested in science but because they have a fear of looking f...
