Waiting for water to boil is a minor inconvenience that we’ve all experienced. Maybe next time try the world’s most powerful X-ray laser, which has now been used to boil water to 100,000° C in 75 millionths of a billionth of a second, turning it into a new plasma-like state of matter in the process.
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At the heart of an atomic clock are, as the name suggests, atoms of a specific type. Now, physicists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have found that lutetium atoms could make for more stable atomic clocks.
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Graphene hogs all the headlines about two-dimensional materials, but it might just be the beginning. Researchers have now isolated a 2D form of the soft metal gallium, dubbed "gallenene," which could make for efficient, thin metal contacts in electronic devices.
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Ball lightning has been consistently reported for centuries, and yet we still know very little about it. Now, scientists have created quantum ball lightning by knotting together the magnetic spins of atoms, which could help unlock the secrets of the phenomenon, or make more stable fusion reactors.
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As tiny as they are, there's a relatively large amount of empty space inside an atom. Now, scientists from Austria and the US have filled in some of those gaps, creating a new state of matter in the form of "giant atoms" filled with other atoms.
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Researchers have now found a way for graphene to be used as a clean and potentially unlimited energy source. By tapping into the random fluctuations of the carbon atoms that make up graphene sheets, the scientists can generate an alternating current strong enough to indefinitely power a wristwatch.
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To better understand molecular events, scientists use short-pulse X-ray lasers to take precise snapshots. Now, researchers at ETH Zurich have managed to shorten the pulse of an X-ray laser down to 43 attoseconds – which the team says is the shortest controlled event ever created by humankind.
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To get a better look at the molecular scale we need a “camera” that’s several kilometers long, and one such facility is firing up this month. The European X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL), which happens to be the largest x-ray laser in the world, can take 3,000 images per second of that tiny world.
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Having created the world’s smallest magnet, IBM has managed to store one bit of data in a single atom, in a breakthrough that could lead to storage devices that can hold 1,000 times more data in the same physical space.
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Geologists estimate that the Earth’s core is a sweltering 5,700 K – and yet the inner core is a solid ball of iron. Why it doesn’t liquify is a bit of a mystery, but now a study puts forward a new theory, simulating how solid iron can remain atomically stable under such extreme conditions.
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