Electrons

Researchers have discovered a material that can switch between an insulator and a conductor freely, even at room temperature. The material, a compound of manganese and sulfide (MnS2), starts off as an insulator but becomes conductive under pressure.

Physicists have outlined a relatively simple new way to create antimatter, by firing two lasers at each other to reproduce the conditions near a neutron star, converting light into matter and antimatter. Doing so could unlock cosmological mysteries.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have created a crystal made entirely of electrons. The structures have been theorized for decades, but this marks the first time they’ve been experimentally confirmed in the lab.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider probes the fringes of known physics, and now the facility has found particles not behaving as predicted. While it’s early days, the discovery hints at the existence of new particles or forces beyond the Standard Model.

Scientists have found evidence of a “space hurricane” for the first time. The storm, made up of swirling clouds of plasma, raged in Earth’s upper atmosphere for hours, dumping huge amounts of electrons like rain in a system that resembles a regular hurricane.

Princeton physicists have accidentally discovered an unexpected quantum behavior in an insulator that was thought to be unique to metals. The find suggests a brand new type of quantum particle, which the team calls a neutral fermion.

Superconductors – materials in which electricity flows without any resistance whatsoever – could be extremely useful. For the first time ever, engineers have created a superconductor out of a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).

Researchers have for the first time managed to use electricity to switch on magnetism in a material that’s normally non-magnetic. This could be a step towards making electronic components out of common materials that might not otherwise be suitable.

It’s not unusual to find rust around salt water, but now the pairing might be more useful. Researchers have found that electricity can be produced when salt water flows over the top of thin films of rust. The process was previously seen in – what else – graphene, but rust is far easier to scale up.

A team from Stanford has shown that graphene arranged in a specific way can generate a magnetic field. That’s surprising enough, but it turns out this particular form of magnetism has previously only been theorized.

After studying proteins that are key to metabolism in modern cells, researchers reverse engineered a simplified protein that may have been responsible for kickstarting the process in ancient times. And to prove the idea, they then implanted it into living bacteria and found that it works just fine.

If you throw a particle at a wall, there’s a chance that it will suddenly appear on the other side. This is thanks to a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, and now a team of physicists has measured just how long that process takes.