Browse Physics

Some heart attacks might be stopped by applying only a small shock to the heart, computer simulations indicate.

A new imaging technique provides nanometer-scale resolution by using light to sense molecular vibrations.

Researchers measured and controlled the twisting force that a laser beam exerts on small particles.

Knots sliding along a single DNA strand may help reveal how cells keep their genes from getting tangled.

Forcing DNA to flow cyclically through regions of different temperatures causes it to reproduce, demonstrating a possible scenario for the creation of life.

Experiments help explain a poorly understood phenomenon: the attraction of giant, like-charged molecules in water.

An out-of-focus microscope captures moving ripples on a cell surface.

Twist may play an essential role in stabilizing the fibers that distort red blood cells in patients with sickle cell disease.

DNA molecules squirt from a confined space into an open one under the propulsion of entropy alone.

Networks of nerve cells show patterns of activity characteristic of self-organizing systems.

A proposed ‘thermal rectifier’ would conduct heat preferentially in one direction.

The springiness of living cells is like that of glasses.

Two DNA segments with identical sequences may attract one another as part of the cell’s repair system.

A new technique measures the mechanical properties of cell membranes by watching the motion of small beads attached to 20-micrometer-diameter bubbles of membrane surrounded by a layer of protein.

A new thoery describes the relationship between MRI data and blood flow to the heart muscle.

A team of physicists has developed a mathematical model of cell differentiation that reproduces some phenomena biologists have observed in real fly eyes.

Biophysicists have shown that the rate of stretching determines the mechanical strength of a bond and have measured that strength in both the spontaneous and force-induced bond breaking regimes.