Browse Physics

Allured by the chic perception and higher funding levels of disease-oriented research, many physicists have migrated to cell biology. Does physics really play a dominant role, or is cellular physiology slave to genetics and chemistry?

Light pulses injected into an array of waveguides form solitons in time and space.

New techniques measure mechanical properties of proteins without damaging them.

Spatial variations can drive evolution in certain ecological habitats.

A new analysis clears some of the remaining hurdles to a completely rigorous density-functional theory for calculating the properties of materials at finite temperature.

Foraging animals or other randomly moving entities can more easily avoid each other by taking more long-distance jumps, according to theoretical results, which may also apply to epidemics and database searches.

Modeling shows that globalization of trade makes the world economy more sensitive to shock and slower to recover.

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.

A microscopic model of innovation tells us how human progress occurs in fits and starts.

Statistical physics chimes in on how popularity changes in the virtual world of the Web.

Reducing coordination among local nodes in a network suffering from time lags can improve the overall performance of the entire network.

The reasons why complex systems like neuronal networks process some signals better than others might be buried in the noise.

A simple model explores some of the factors that constrain the shape of rodlike bacteria as they grow.

A mathematical model for swarming locusts suggests that their random direction switches occur after small errors of many individuals add up to a large effect.

The squashed, peanutlike shapes of a rubber band rolling at various speeds are predicted by equations that model the competition between gravitational, bending, and inertial forces.

Experiments with thin films show what factors control wrinkling and folding.

New ways to describe the spread of “persistent” diseases, which can lie dormant in the population for years, are emerging from statistical physics.

DNA replication slows if the number of defects in a genome is above a threshold value.

Magnetic resonance images of tetrahedral dice show a density of random close packing, in agreement with recent calculations.

As aqueous emulsions containing colloidal particles dry, two very different behaviors are observed.