Recent Articles
A Little Noise Helps a Soft Valve Close
A simplified model of the heart’s mitral valve shows that flow fluctuations can cause a soft valve to close at about one-tenth the pressure required under steady flow. Read More »
Rearranging Crystals from Within
Julian Klein and Frances Ross explain how electron microscopes are becoming tools for engineering defects inside crystalline materials. Read More »
Spinning Liquid into Solid
A new technique for generating solid fibers from a liquid jet is easier to model—and thus easier to control—than past methods. Read More »
The Giant Permittivity of Nanoconfined Water
Researchers have proposed that long-range molecular dipole correlations alter water’s electrical properties when it’s confined in a gap a few nanometers wide. Read More »
Simulating Particle Creation with Cold Atoms
Researchers observe atoms trapped in an optical lattice mimicking particles created in a strong electric field. Read More »
Snapshot: In the Eye of the Beholder
The shape of gold nanostructures changes depending on how they are imaged. Read More »
The Unexpected Ubiquity of the Phonon Thermal Hall Effect
The discovery of a thermal version of the Hall effect in common semiconductors challenges our understanding of how magnetic fields and heat fluxes interact within solids. Read More »
Quantum Light Reveals How Solvents Affect Molecules
Pairs of photons provide a gentle way to measure the impact of a molecule’s environment on its ultrafast dynamics. Read More »
Quasicrystalline Water Waves
A pattern of surface waves bestowed with fivefold symmetry hosts topological structures. Read More »
