Elephant Trunks Inspire Versatile Chemical Sensors
Some animals have a superpower in their sense of smell. They explore, interpret, and understand their world with such sensitivity that people have enlisted canines to help solve crime and detect cancer on the breath. Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology are now homing in on the secrets behind animals’ super sniffers to develop…
Lasers Travel Faster than Speed of Light
Scientists have produced an extremely bright spot of light that can travel at any speed — including faster than the speed of light. Researchers have found a way to use this concept, called “flying focus,” to move an intense laser focal point over long distances at any speed. Their technique includes capturing some of the…
Lasers Blast Antimatter into Existence
Antimatter is an exotic material that vaporizes when it contacts regular matter. If you hit an antimatter baseball with a bat made of regular matter, it would explode in a burst of light. It is rare to find antimatter on Earth, but it is believed to exist in the furthest reaches of the universe. Amazingly,…
Magnetic Pumping Pushes Plasma Particles to High Energies
A Turbulent Solution to a Growing Problem
A recent experiment lead by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), researchers on the DIII-D tokamak suggests that plasma turbulence can prevent filamentary structures called magnetic islands from growing so large that they cool off the 100 million degree plasma. This plasma needs to be as hot as possible so that individual nuclei collide with…