Category: condensation
Aerosols, very small particles suspended in the air, play an important role in the global climate balance and in regulating climate change.
DURHAM, N.C. ?- What do spore-launching mushrooms have in common with highly water-repellant surfaces?
DURHAM, N.C. ?- An ancient Confucian philosopher once said, "I love the lotus because while growing from mud, it is unstained."
The astrophysicist João Alves, director of the Calar Alto Observatory in Almeria, and his colleague Andreas Bürkert, from the German observatory in the University of Munich, believe that "the inevitable future of the starless cloud Barnard 68" is to collapse and give rise to a new star, according to an article which has been published recently in The Astrophysical Journal.
MBL, WOODS HOLE, MA -- Scientists have discovered that cells use a very simple phase transition -- similar to water vapor condensing into dew -- to assemble and localize subcellular structures that are involved in formation of the embryo.
The DNA in the 23 pairs of chromosomes in each of the billions of cells of the human body is so tightly packed that it would measure six feet in length if stretched end to end. A genome of this size can squeeze into a cell's tiny nucleus because it is compressed into highly condensed chromatin fibers by proteins called histones.
The identity and origin of tiny, potentially hazardous particles emitted from common laser printers have been revealed by a new study at Queensland University of Technology.
Space dust annoys astronomers just as much as the household variety when it interferes with their observations of distant stars. And yet space dust also poses one of the great mysteries of astronomy.
The Weizmann Institute of Science today announced that a research group headed by Dr. Ernesto Joselevich has developed a new approach to create patterns of carbon nanotubes by formation along atomic steps on sapphire surfaces. Carbon nanotubes are excellent candidates for the production of nanoelectronic circuits, but their assembly into ordered arrays remains a major obstacle toward this application.
Bose-Einstein condensates are enigmatic states of matter in which huge numbers of particles occupy the same quantum state and, for all intents and purposes, lose their individual identity. Predicted long ago by Albert Einstein and Satyendranath Bose, these bizarre condensates have recently become one of the hottest topics in physics research worldwide. Now, physicists at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin have created a sustained Bose-Einstein condensate of excitons, unusual particles that inhabit solid semiconductor materials.
Scientists have discovered an ideal candidate for Bose-Einstein condensation in the ancient Chinese pigment, Han Purple. In research featured recently on the cover of Physical Review Letters, the team describes how the application of a strong magnetic field to Han Purple (BaCuSi2O6) creates a gas of bosonic spin triplet excitations. The field acts as a chemical potential causing the weakly interacting bosonic gas to undergo Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) when the temperature is reduced to minus 453 degrees Fahrenheit, six orders of magnitude higher than the temperature normally required for BEC in atomic gases.
Observations by an international team of astronomers have thrown new light on the earliest epoch of the Milky Way galaxy. The first-ever measurement of the Beryllium content in two stars in a globular cluster - pushing current astronomical technology towards the limit - has made it possible to study the early phase between the formation of the first generation of stars in the Milky Way and that of this stellar cluster. The new observations thus indicate that the first generation of stars in the Milky Way galaxy formed soon after the end of the ~200 million-year long "Dark Ages" that succeeded the Big Bang.
There are two fundamentally distinct families of particles in nature: bosons and fermions. Being a boson or a fermion has profound consequences on the 'social behaviour' of a particle when it meets other partners. Whereas bosons tend to socialize and want to be as close to each other as possible, fermions are very independent and like to be on their own. In what represents an unprecedented manipulation of matter, researchers now report that they have been able to fermionize a gas of bosonic atoms.
