South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius raised a ruckus last summer when the he wanted to qualify for the Beijing Olympics, thanks to the J-shaped carbon fiber blades that the double-amputee uses to run. Pistorius didn’t get to run in last summer’s games, but now an MIT team has released a study declaring that he doesn’t have an unfair advantage. Rather, the researchers found quite the opposite: Running blades for amputees, even made with today’s best materials, can’t compete with the legs that humans have evolved.
Pistorius has long argued that he should be allowed to compete alongside able-bodied athletes in races, but athletics authorities banned him from doing so in last year’s Olympic games, claiming that his blades gave him an unfair advantage over able-bodied athletes [The Guardian]. The MIT Media lab team led by Alena Grabowski helped to reverse his racing ban before turning its attention this year to the general question of whether blades or legs are better.
The team concocted a clever solution to the problem of testing this question. The study participants were six elite sprinters who had one intact leg and one leg that had been amputated below the knee. Researchers decided to study these types of amputees because they could compare their affected leg to their unaffected leg [Los Angeles Times].
Magnets may have seemed simple when you learned about them in elementary school, but physicists are coaxing some very odd behaviors out of magnetic materials these days. In the latest new development, scientists created the magnetic equivalent of electricity and named the phenomenon “magnetricity.” In the same way that electrically charged particles flow to create an electric current, individual north and south magnetic poles have been observed flowing along to generate a magnetic current.
The basis of the experiment was a refutation of a rule of magnetism observed in our day-to-day lives: No matter how many times you divide a magnet, the resulting fragments will always have both north and south poles. But more than 70 years ago, physicist Paul Dirac theorized that elementary particles should exist that have only a north or south pole, and dubbed these theoretical particles magnetic monopoles. Last month, researchers got closer to spotting a monopole than ever before, when they created ripples that had the same magnetic properties as monopoles.
The new study, published in Nature, describes the phenomenon in a strange, crystalline material known as spin ice. These crystals are made up of pyramids of charged atoms, or ions, arranged in such a way that when cooled to exceptionally low temperatures, the materials show tiny, discrete packets of magnetic charge. Now one of those teams has gone on to show that these “quasi-particles” of magnetic charge can move together, forming a magnetic current just like the electric current formed by moving electrons [BBC News].
In a lab in Nanjing, China, two researchers are mucking about with what could be called the world’s first artificial black hole–but there’s no reason for alarm. The researchers, Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui, haven’t created a doomsday device, but rather a nifty experiment that harnesses the strange properties of metamaterials. Physicists have already learned how to steer light around an object within a metamaterial to create an invisibility cloak…. Now Qiang and Tie have created a metamaterial that distorts space so severely that light entering it (in this case microwaves) cannot escape [Technology Review].
The lab experiment simulates a cosmological black hole, where the intense gravity curves space-time, sucking in any matter or radiation that gets too close. Not even light can escape a black hole (hence the name). The researchers couldn’t duplicate the intense gravity, but they could build a metamaterial with a physical structure that would make light curve into its central core, never to return. The device they built works only with microwaves so far, but the researchers say a visible light black hole is the next step.
A new surface coating could mean the end of roach traps as we know them. The plastic-like material, called a polyimide resin, is like a Slip ‘n Slide for the normally sure-footed roaches. Insects naturally secrete a fluid that’s an emulsion of oily and watery liquids that helps them stick to almost any surface. The scientists’ polyimide coating absorbs the watery part, cutting bugs’ friction on vertical surfaces by about 40 percent [Popular Science].
In an experiment, a rod with an apple on top was painted with a number of different chemicals, including the polyimide resin. Scientists observed roaches climbing to reach the apple, and measured the friction between the roaches feet and the rod. They found that roaches effortlessly shimmied up rods coated in PTFE, a non-stick coating commonly found on cooking pans. But when the rods were covered in polyimide resin, the creatures lost their grip [New Scientist].
Tired of cellphones and other electronic gadgets that run out of juice too quickly? Then you can happily look forward to further developments from the lab of researcher Jae Wan Kwon, who has developed a long-lasting nuclear battery the size and thickness of a penny. In time, Kwon hopes to get the size down so that the battery is no thicker than a human hair.
The batteries pose no danger of a nuclear meltdown, Kwon notes. Although nuclear batteries generate electricity from atomic energy like nuclear reactors, they don’t use a chain reaction, instead using the emissions from a radioactive isotope to generate electricity [Gizmag]. As the isotope naturally decays, the charged particles released can be used to create an electrical current. Nuclear batteries, which hold their charges for years, are already used in some specialty fields. For example, they’re used to power spacecraft that are voyaging too far from the sun to run on solar panels, and also in pacemakers, since changing a battery inside the body would be rather inconvenient. But the existing batteries are large and expensive.
One day, the most advanced ships may not have steel hulls that slice cleanly through the water, but instead may sort of ooze along, leaving a wake of slime and microbes. Researchers are trying to design a ship that continuously exudes slime to form a coating around its hull that steadily wears away, taking hangers-on like barnacles with it.
Barnacles and the other sea creatures that accumulate on boats’ undersides create drag, and therefore reduce speed and energy-efficiency. The problem is an expensive one, as it requires vessels to be brought into dry dock every couple of years to remove plants and animals from the hull. It has been made worse by the banning last year of antifouling paints based on tributyltin, which is toxic to marine life [New Scientist].
Physicists have found a way to tweak a basic law of nature, and have reversed the rule that opposites–as in oppositely charged droplets of liquid–attract. Typically, when a drop of liquid with a positive charge gets near to another drop with a negative charge, the two come together and merge into a larger whole. But researchers discovered that in a strong electric field with two highly charged droplets, the drops bounce off each other instead.
In the study, published in Nature, researchers used high-speed video to find out what was happening. Drops of liquid usually form tight spheres, but as two electrically charged droplets come close to each other, the spheres begin to warp — and at very short distances, a small bridge of fluid forms between the drops. When the electrical charge is low, that bridge grows until the drops merge together, but when the charge is high, something else happens: the bridge allows the droplets to exchange their charge and then snaps. The water flows back into the bubbles, and by the time the two drops collide, they are back in their spherical shape. Rather than merging, their surface tension causes them to bounce off one another like beach balls [Nature].
Physicists can come off like monster hunters sometimes–their theories predict that a rare beast lurks in the atomic-scale underbrush, so they forge on against all odds, determined to catch a glimpse of their quarry. The latest target is the magnetic monopole, and researchers say they’ve come closer than ever before to spotting it.
Every magnet has a north and a south pole; if you break a magnet into hundreds of pieces, each fragment will also have a north and a south pole of its own. But researchers think that magnetic monopoles exist–particles with only a north or south pole–and there are several reasons physicists would like to see them. In 1931, famed British theorist Paul Dirac argued that the existence of monopoles would explain the quantization of electric charge: the fact that every electron has exactly the same charge and exactly the opposite charge of every proton [ScienceNOW Daily News].
Scientists have scoured the world and the cosmos looking for such particles, says Jonathan Morris, coauthor of one of the two new studies published in Science. “People have been looking for monopoles in cosmic rays and particle accelerators — even Moon rocks” [Nature News], he says. And while the two research groups didn’t quite find the elusive particles, they did detect ripples in strange materials known as spin ices, and found that the ripples have the same magnetic properties as monopoles.
With a lot of skillful maneuverings, a team of researchers have finally found a way to image a molecule. The portrait of pentacene, an organic molecule consisting of five benzene rings, shows off the chemical bonds between the carbon and hydrogen atoms.
It may seem a somewhat surprising first, since atoms have been imaged for decades. The earliest pictures of individual atoms were captured in the 1970s by blasting a target – typically a chunk of metal – with a beam of electrons, a technique known as transmission electron microscopy (TEM)…. But strange though it might seem, imaging larger molecules at the same level of detail has not been possible – atoms are robust enough to withstand existing tools, but the structures of molecules are not [New Scientist].
In the new study, published in Science, researchers used an atomic force microscope to image the molecule in unprecedented resolution. The measurement requires extremes of precision. In order to avoid the effects of stray gas molecules bounding around, or the general atomic-scale jiggling that room-temperature objects experience, the whole setup has to be kept under high vacuum and at blisteringly cold temperatures [BBC News]; 5 Kelvin, to be exact. Rather than relying on an optical system to produce pictures, atomic force microscopes use a probe that narrows to an atomic-scale tip, and measures the forces of attraction between the tip and the molecule’s components.
What if you could take a video billboard like those that light up Times Square and wrap it around a bus–without impeding the passengers’ view through the windows? While some folks who worry about ads saturating our environment would probably be horrified, others might admit that it would be a pretty neat technological trick. Now, a new method of producing the inorganic light emitting diodes (ILEDs) that light up billboards offers a possible way to bring that trick about.
The findings, published in Science, come as something of a surprise. It’s been organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) that have been a hot field of research lately, as scientists experimented with ways to spread films of organic compounds–which emit light when an electric current passes through them–over thin, flexible surfaces. But OLEDs aren’t very powerful, which caused lead researcher John Rogers to look for new ways to make inorganic diodes. Says Rogers: “If you look at the billboard displays that exist already, they’re inorganic LED based…. You can see them on a bright sunny day; it would be impossible to generate that kind of brightness out of an organic LED” [BBC News].
A humble marine worm may hold the key to mending bones that have been shattered: a strong adhesive that the worm uses to build its shell, and which hardens despite the worm’s watery habitat. Sandcastle worms, Phragmatopoma californica, dwell in the intertidal zone where they construct a tubelike shell by gluing together bits of sand, broken shells and other mineral debris. The glue is secreted from a special gland and hardens in less than 30 seconds underwater, forming a leatherlike consistency over several hours [Science News].
Medical engineer Russell Stewart has been working on a synthetic glue modeled on the worm’s adhesive. He thinks the worm-inspired glue could be just the thing for piecing together the small fragments of bone that result from complex breaks that must be glued within the wet environment of the body. “There’s lots of synthetic adhesives in widespread use for other things, [but] there’s no adhesives used for deep tissue repair,” Stewart said. Current remedies are primarily mechanical fixes, such as screws, pins, and plates, which can be an inefficient method for repairing highly fractured bones [The Scientist].
Researchers have created a fabric that acts like a camera, made of tiny light-sensitive fibers that turn light waves into images. Says lead researcher Yoel Fink: “While the current version of these fabrics can only image nearby objects, it can still see much farther than most shirts can” [LiveScience].
Fink notes that the technology does away with one of the most basic camera components: the lens. Just like in an eye, cameras use a curved lens to focus the light waves reflected off an object, but the system contains an Achilles’ heel: Damage the lens, and you lose or diminish the ability to see [ScienceNOW Daily News]. By getting rid of the lens, researchers say they can develop a technology that is less vulnerable to damage–if one part of the fabric gets damaged, the rest can still function. “We are saying, ‘instead of a tiny, sensitive object [for capturing images], let’s construct a large, distributed system,’” Fink said [LiveScience].
The sand that runs through an hourglass may look like a smooth and regular stream of particles, but if you had a big enough hourglass and a fancy enough camera, you’d see that those grains of sand behave in strange ways, not like a regular solid. In fact, the stream of grains begins to look more like a liquid as it falls, with the particles clustering together to form “droplets.”
For the study, published in Nature, researchers created a stream of tiny glass beads, each about the width of a human hair. The team dropped an $80,000 high-speed camera in free fall with the glass to capture still pictures of the same three-centimeter-long section of the grain flow [Science News], and watched as the stream separated into distinct droplets over the course of falling three feet. In another experiment, researchers examined two individual beads under an atomic force microscope, and found that the attraction between the two can be explained by an extremely weak surface tension in the beads. Previously, scientists thought grains did not display surface tension, or if they did, the effects were too small to change the flow of the particles. “But this experiment says that if we look very carefully, we find surface tension is almost zero, but it is not exactly zero” [Science News], says study coauthor Heinrich Jaeger.
The battle of the light bulb may not be quite over. While traditional incandescents will soon be phased out in the United States and abroad, researchers are plugging away to create more efficient versions that comply with looming new standards — while also providing an alternative for consumers who find compact fluorescents objectionable [The New York Times, blog]. In one new study, researchers have demonstrated how an incandescent bulb can be modified to give out much more light without requiring more power.
Lead researcher Chunlei Guo and his colleagues were experimenting with the effect of ultrafast laser pulses on metals when they noticed that pulses lasting only a few femtoseconds–quadrillionths of a second–could fundamentally change the molecular arrangement of metals without melting them [ScienceNOW Daily News]. The laser blasts caused the metal to turn black, which boosted its ability to absorb light. Because the law of thermal radiation state that materials that can absorb a great deal of energy will also emit large amounts of energy, the researchers decided to see if their laser treatment would boost the light output of the metal filament in an ordinary light bulb.
In chunks of rock quarried from a Russian mountain range, physicists have found perfect “quasicrystals,” a type of material that researchers previously thought could only be created in a lab. Quasicrystals display ordered arrangements and symmetries but are not periodic—that is, they are not defined by a single unit cell (such as a cube) that simply repeats itself in three dimensions [Scientific American]. Instead, quasicrystals have two different geometric structures that alternate, and that are organized in ways which create complex patterns and symmetries. When such a pattern is laid out in two-dimensions, the resulting design is often called Penrose tiling.
Quasicrystals were first created in the lab in 1984, and physicist Paul Steinhardt, a coauthor of the current study, says the hunt for naturally occurring quasicrystals began about 10 years ago. “The latest issue surrounding quasicrystals has been could nature ever make them? … When we make them in the lab we try very hard to make perfect quasicrystals, but nature has no such goal” [Discovery News]. The researchers put out a call to mineralogists around the world, asking them to send in likely rock samples for testing.
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South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius raised a ruckus last summer when the he wanted to qualify for the Beijing Olympics, thanks to the J-shaped carbon fiber blades that the double-amputee uses to run. Pistorius didn’t get to run in last summer’s games, but now an MIT team has released a study declaring that he doesn’t have an unfair advantage. Rather, the researchers found quite the opposite: Running blades for amputees, even made with today’s best materials, can’t compete with the legs that humans have evolved.
Magnets may have seemed simple when you learned about them in elementary school, but physicists are coaxing some very odd behaviors out of 
In a lab in Nanjing, China, two researchers are mucking about with what could be called the world’s first artificial black hole–but there’s no reason for alarm. The researchers, Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui, haven’t created a doomsday device, but rather a nifty experiment that harnesses the strange properties of metamaterials. Physicists have already learned how to
Tired of cellphones and other electronic gadgets that run out of juice too quickly? Then you can happily look forward to further developments from the lab of researcher Jae Wan Kwon, who has developed a long-lasting 
One day, the most advanced ships may not have steel hulls that slice cleanly through the water, but instead may sort of ooze along, leaving a wake of slime and microbes. Researchers are trying to design a ship that continuously exudes slime to form a coating around its hull that steadily wears away, taking hangers-on like barnacles with it.
Physicists have found a way to tweak a basic law of nature, and have reversed the rule that opposites–as in oppositely charged droplets of liquid–attract. Typically, when a drop of liquid with a positive charge gets near to another drop with a negative charge, the two come together and merge into a larger whole. But researchers discovered that in a strong electric field with two highly charged droplets, the drops bounce off each other instead.
Physicists can come off like monster hunters sometimes–their theories predict that a rare beast lurks in the atomic-scale underbrush, so they forge on against all odds, determined to catch a glimpse of their quarry. The latest target is the 
With a lot of skillful maneuverings, a team of researchers have finally found a way to image a molecule. The portrait of pentacene, an organic molecule consisting of five benzene rings, shows off the chemical bonds between the carbon and hydrogen atoms.
What if you could take a video billboard like those that light up Times Square and wrap it around a bus–without impeding the passengers’ view through the windows? While some folks who 
A humble marine worm may hold the key to mending bones that have been shattered: a strong adhesive that the worm uses to build its shell, and which hardens despite the worm’s watery habitat. Sandcastle worms, Phragmatopoma californica, dwell in the intertidal zone where they construct a tubelike shell by gluing together bits of sand, broken shells and other mineral debris. The glue is secreted from a special gland and hardens in less than 30 seconds underwater, forming a leatherlike consistency over several hours [
Researchers have created a fabric that acts like a camera, made of tiny light-sensitive fibers that turn 
The sand that runs through an hourglass may look like a smooth and regular stream of particles, but if you had a big enough hourglass and a fancy enough camera, you’d see that those grains of sand behave in strange ways, not like a regular solid. In fact, the stream of grains begins to look more like a liquid as it falls, with the particles clustering together to form “droplets.”
The battle of the light bulb may not be quite over. While traditional incandescents will soon be phased out in the United States and abroad, researchers are plugging away to create more efficient versions that comply with looming new standards — while also providing an alternative for consumers who find compact fluorescents objectionable [
In chunks of rock quarried from a Russian mountain range, physicists have found perfect “quasicrystals,” a type of material that researchers previously thought could only be created in a lab. Quasicrystals display ordered arrangements and symmetries but are not periodic—that is, they are not defined by a single unit cell (such as a cube) that simply repeats itself in three dimensions [
