Researchers at RMIT University have engineered a new type of transistor, the building block for all electronics. Instead of sending electrical currents through silicon, these transistors send electrons through narrow air gaps, where they can travel unimpeded as if in space. The device unveiled in material sciences journal Nano Letters, eliminates the use of any …
Researchers reporting in Current Biology on November 19 have found that a vast array of regularly spaced, still-inhabited termite mounds in northeastern Brazil—covering an area the size of Great Britain—are up to about 4,000 years old. The mounds, which are easily visible on Google Earth, are not nests. Rather, they are the result of the …
A new study published in Nature Climate Change provides one of the most comprehensive assessments yet of how humanity is being impacted by the simultaneous occurrence of multiple climate hazards strengthened by increasing greenhouse gas emissions. This research reveals that society faces a much larger threat from climate change than previous studies have suggested. An …
University of Sydney astronomers, working with international colleagues, have found a star system like none seen before in our galaxy. The scientists believe one of the stars—about 8000 light years from Earth—is the first known candidate in the Milky Way to produce a dangerous gamma-ray burst, among the most energetic events in the universe, when …
In most animal societies, members of one sex dominate those of the other. Is this, as widely believed, an inevitable consequence of a disparity in strength and ferocity between males and females? Not necessarily. A new study on wild spotted hyaenas shows that in this social carnivore, females dominate males because they can rely on …
Earth’s latest ice age may have been caused by changes deep inside the planet. Based on evidence from the Pacific Ocean, including the position of the Hawaiian Islands, Rice University geophysicists have determined Earth shifted relative to its spin axis within the past 12 million years, which caused Greenland to move far enough toward the …
Wok tossing is essential for making a good fried rice—or so claim a group of researchers presenting new work at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, which will take place Nov. 18-20 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The researchers, led by David Hu, a fluid mechanics …
Scientists from the University of Wollongong (UOW), working with colleagues at China’s Beihang University, Nankai University, and Institute of Physics at Chinese Academy of Sciences, have successfully created an atomic scale, two-dimensional electronic kagome lattice with potential applications in electronics and quantum computing. The research paper is published in the November issue of Science Advances. …
Until recently, scientists thought of viruses as mostly small infectious agents, tiny compared to typical bacteria and human cells. So imagine the surprise when biologist Jeff Blanchard and Ph.D. student Lauren Alteio at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with others at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), discovered giant viruses—relatively speaking …
Pushing the limits of cryo-electron microscopy, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have captured freeze-frames of the changing shape of a huge molecule, one of the body’s key molecular machines, as it locks onto DNA and loads the machinery for reading the genetic code. The molecule, called transcription factor IID, is critical to transcribing genes into …
