Browse Physics

Experiments and simulations lead to a new model for the curling of a thin strip, which could be useful for plant growth and micromechanics.

An image analysis program reveals the biomechanics of walking with coffee.

Large numbers of neurons can, according to a computational model, distinguish the timing of aural cues more finely than individual cells.

A network model incorporates the way humans use a sense of orientation to make locally optimal decisions when they navigate city streets.

Bumblebee flight patterns reveal how the presence of spiders causes bees to modify their foraging strategies.

Using a simplified airplane seating arrangement, theorists have found that boarding time is less dependent on the number of passengers than one might expect.

Motion in an ice avalanche is strongly affected by the feedback effect of melting.

A study of the American Physical Society journals shows that the way in which papers lose relevance over time has a strong influence on the citation statistics.

A new, secure way to send messages camouflages them inside the same kind of self-organizing patterns that appear in vegetation patterns and the stripes on animal coats.

Simulations explain why the first wave of a tsunami is sometimes less devastating than the subsequent waves. A resonance effect can boost the waves that come later.

According to new calculations, prolonged chemical oscillations that occur in the metabolic process of glycolysis can be linked to a single enzyme.

‘Explosive’ chaos may occur in a system experiencing a sudden change–like an electric circuit moments after it’s switched on–according to theoretical work.

Building simplified genetic networks in a test tube could help us better understand biological systems.

In networks like blood vessels and leaf veins, feedback between the formation of branches and the signals that propagate through them leads to new types of growth patterns.

Though often ignored, the normal component of a superfluid reveals much about turbulence in a two-fluid system.

The patterns in two spinning tanks of fluid representing different parts of the Earth’s atmosphere can synchronize with only a small amount of thermal coupling, suggesting that heat flow can transmit weather cycles over long distances.

The ability to predict structurally localized patches in a fluid provides a step toward describing the evolution from laminar to turbulent flow.

Thermal magnetic fluctuations, usually thought of as a barrier to magnetic information storage and processing, can be harnessed to make green, low-energy magnetic applications a possibility.

A single $30$-femtosecond pulse has been used to observe x-ray diffraction of a magnetic material, potentially opening the way to ultrafast probing of spin dynamics with nanometer spatial resolution.

The idea behind adaptive behavioral epidemiology is that groups and individuals respond to the knowledge of a disease threat by changing their habits to avoid interactions with those who are contagious. Network-based models take this adaptive behavior into account by allowing the network to “rewire” its connections.