Zhang and colleagues found that the filaments – which are several centimetres long – have two distinct stable states depending on their length. Below a certain threshold the filament stret...
The JIF scheme was set up in 1998 by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust – the world’s largest biomedical research charity – to provide much-needed funding for university labora...
Some liquids are very useful because their molecules act as tiny dipoles that can be aligned by electric or magnetic fields. Vehicle clutches, ink-jet printers and lubricants are among the application...
Ordinary experimental fluids are subject to effects like viscosity and can be difficult to manipulate. Durkin and Fajans therefore used a cylindrical column of magnetically confined electrons to simul...
Although researchers have proposed a wide variety of explanations for sonoluminescence, they are in broad agreement that the oscillating bubbles reach very high temperatures. Until now, however, singl...
Scientists originally thought the shrimps’ snapping sound was produced by mechanical contact between opposing sides of the claw. But Barbara Schmitz, a biologist at the Technical University of M...
Hendrik Schon, Christian Kloc and Batlogg investigated three different acenes: anthracene (which contains three linked rings), tetracene (four) and pentacene (five). The crystals are normally insulati...
Bernard Yurke from Lucent Technologies in the US, Andrew Turberfield from Oxford University in the UK and Lucent, and co-workers constructed the tweezers from three separate strands of DNA. DNA molecu...
Stefan Hell and co-workers at Gottingen have adapted a technique known as fluorescence microscopy. In this form of microscopy the specimen is irradiated at a wavelength which excites either natural or...