Matter & Energy

Ew, a cockroach! But it zips off before the swatter appears. Now, researchers have leveraged the bug's superb scurrying skills to create a cleverly simple method to assess and improve locomotion in robots. Normally, tedious modeling of…

For every acre of mule deer habitat taken by roads, well pads and other oil and gas development infrastructure in Wyoming's Green River Basin, an average of 4.6 other acres of available forage is lost, according to new research by…

By combining cutting-edge machine learning with 19th-century mathematics, a Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) mathematician is working to make NASA spacecraft lighter and more damage tolerant by developing methods to detect…

Quantum mechanics boasts all sorts of strange features, one being quantum superposition -- the peculiar circumstance in which particles seem to be in two or more places or states at once. Now, an international group of physicists led by…

In a new study, researchers demonstrate creative tactics to get rid of loopholes that have long confounded tests of quantum mechanics. With their innovative method, the researchers were able to demonstrate quantum interactions between two…

How do you know a cell has a fever? Take its temperature. That's now possible thanks to research by Rice University scientists who used the light-emitting properties of particular molecules to create a fluorescent nano-thermometer. The Rice…

Smartphones that don't scratch or shatter. Metal-free pacemakers. Electronics for space and other harsh environments. These could all be made possible thanks to a new ceramic welding technology developed by a team of engineers at the…

Neutrinos come in three flavours made up of a mix of three neutrino masses. While the differences between the masses are known, little information was available about the mass of the lightest species until now. It's important to better…

Polymer chemists and materials scientists have achieved some notable advances that mimic Nature, but one of the most common and practical features of cells has so far been out of reach -- intracellular compartmentalization. It refers to the…

Slow electons can be used to destroy cancer cells -- but how exactly this happens has not been well understood. Now scientists have been able to demonstrate that a previously little-observed effect actually plays a pivotal role: Due to a…