News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Radiation levels in parts of the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific Ocean, where the United States conducted nearly 70 nuclear tests during the Cold War, are still alarmingly high. Columbia University researchers tested soil samples on four uninhabited isles and discovered that they contained concentrations of nuclear isotopes that are significantly higher than those found near Chernobyl and Fukushima.

An article published in the journal PLOS Pathogens reports a realistic computational model for the structure and mechanism of replication of prions, infectious agents responsible for mad cow disease and other neurodegenerative disorders of human and animals.

NUST MISIS scientists together with the colleagues from PN Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics Lomonosov Moscow State University and Dagestan State University have published the first results of a 'scan' obtained by the method of muon radiography of the underground space in the Derbent fortress of Naryn-Kala.

In a global first, NUS scientists have demonstrated that heat energy can be manipulated by utilising the quantum mechanical principle of anti-parity-time symmetry. Using this method, they were able to control the flow of heat in a material.

For the first time ever, experimental physicists have been able to influence the magnetic moment of materials in sync with their electronic properties. The coupled optical and magnetic excitation within one femtosecond corresponds to an acceleration by a factor of 200 and is the fastest magnetic phenomenon that has ever been observed.

In new research from Berkeley Lab and our collaborators, scientists discovered how a protein produced by bullfrogs inhibits the deadly neurotoxin involved in red tide events, glimpsed how atoms move in four dimensions, and identified a bacterial gene that could be engineered into biofuel-producing microbes to greatly boost process efficiency.

University of Tokyo graduate student Yuuki Wada with colleagues from Japan discover a connection between lightning strikes and two kinds of gamma-ray phenomena in thunderclouds. The research suggests that in certain conditions, weak gamma-ray glows from thunderclouds may precede lightning bolts and their accompanying gamma-ray flashes.