Artificial intelligence replaces physicists
Canberra, Australia (SPX) May 19, 2016 -
Physicists are putting themselves out of a job, using artificial intelligence to run a complex experiment. The experiment, developed by physicists from The Australian National University (ANU) and UNSW ADFA, created an extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, replicating the experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize.
"I didn't expect the machine could ...
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Combining nanotextures with Leidenfrost effect for water repellency
Washington DC (SPX) May 18, 2016 -
Combining superhydrophobic surfaces with Leidenfrost levitation - picture a water droplet hovering over a hot surface rather than making physical contact with it - has been explored extensively for the past decade by researchers hoping to uncover the holy grail of water-repellent surfaces.
In a new twist, a group of South Korean researchers from Seoul National University and Dankook Univer ...
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Unveiling the electron's motion in a carbon nanocoil
Toyohashi, Japan (SPX) May 19, 2016 -
Carbon nanocoils (CNCs) are an exotic class of low-dimensional nanocarbons whose helical shape may make them suitable for applications such as microwave absorbers and various mechanical components such as springs. Typical thicknesses and coil diameters of CNCs fall within the ranges of 100-400 nm and 400-1000 nm, respectively, and their full lengths are much larger, on the order of several tens ...
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Bubble volcano: Shaking, popping by earthquakes may cause eruptions
Hiroshima, Japan (SPX) May 19, 2016 -
A new study on the connection between earthquakes and volcanoes took its inspiration from old engineering basics. Future applications of these results may enable better predictions of the likelihood of a volcanic eruption for communities affected by an earthquake.
If you swirl wine in a glass too strongly, the wine crashes against the sides and spills over the top. The same swirling and cr ...
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Rice-led study offers new answer to why Earth's atmosphere became oxygenated
Houston TX (SPX) May 18, 2016 -
Earth scientists from Rice University, Yale University and the University of Tokyo are offering a new answer to the long-standing question of how our planet acquired its oxygenated atmosphere.
Based on a new model that draws from research in diverse fields including petrology, geodynamics, volcanology and geochemistry, the team's findings were published online this week in Nature Geoscienc ...
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Pacific stores the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at depths of thousands of metres
Bremerhaven, Germany (SPX) May 18, 2016 -
An international team of researchers headed by scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute has gained new insights into the carbon dioxide exchange between ocean and atmosphere, thus making a significant contribution to solving one of the great scientific mysteries of the ice ages.
In the past 800,000 years of climate history, the transitions from interglacials and ice ages were always ac ...
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Tiny ocean organism has big role in climate regulation
Exeter, UK (SPX) May 18, 2016 -
Scientists have discovered that a tiny, yet plentiful, ocean organism is playing an important role in the regulation of the Earth's climate. Research, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, has found that the bacterial group Pelagibacterales, thought to be among the most abundant organisms on Earth, comprising up to half a million microbial cells found in every teaspoon of seawater, plays ...
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