Pressure is usually imagined as a force that simply squeezes matter into a smaller space. At the molecular level, however, the story is more subtle. A recent computational chemistry study explored how pressure changes the shapes of molecules and the fleeting structures known as transition states, which appear briefly as reactions occur. The work focused […]
Imagine trying to build a house without a blueprint, find a shortcut through an unfamiliar city without a map, or govern a large organisation with no leaders and no meetings. It sounds impossible. Yet tiny-brained ants, working without leaders or blueprints, have been solving problems like these for millions of years – and no, the […]
Isotope analysis of gas from geothermal springs in Zambia could show that a new continental rift is forming . Unexpectedly high helium isotope ratios indicate that a weakness in Earth’s crust has broken through to reach the mantle beneath. This rift could eventually become a new tectonic plate boundary. In the meantime, opportunities for geothermal […]
Two years ago, in March 2024, I wrote in this blog about a decision that surprised many: the rejection of the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch. After fifteen years of work by an international team of experts, the proposal to declare that we are now living in a new chapter of Earth’s history—one defined […]
Chirality is one of the most familiar ideas in science. Human hands are chiral because the left and right hand are mirror images that cannot be perfectly aligned on top of one another. The same idea appears in chemistry, where molecules with opposite handedness can behave very differently. In recent years, physicists have discovered that […]
Author: Howard Wiseman, Director, Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Griffith University As Homer tells us, Odysseus made an epic journey, against the odds, from Troy to his home in Ithaca. He visited many lands, but mostly dwelt with the nymph Calypso on her island. We can imagine that his wife, Penelope, would have asked him about […]
Artificial Intelligence • Biology • Computer science • Genetics
Researchers at the University of Oregon have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can read genetic code the way large language models like ChatGPT read text. Scanning the genome for biological mutation patterns, the computer model traces pairs of genes back in time to their last common ancestor. It’s the first language model designed for […]
For decades, biology textbooks have repeated the same idea with almost ritual certainty: neural stem cells, the cells that fuel the birth of neurons and glia during development, live exclusively inside the brain and spinal cord. They are the architects of the central nervous system, and nowhere else. It has always seemed like an elegant […]
In recent years, “twistronics” has shown that simply changing how two crystal layers sit on top of each other can completely transform their electronic behavior. When two lattices are slightly mismatched in size or rotated by a small angle, they create a larger repeating interference pattern called a moiré superlattice. This long-wavelength pattern acts like […]
Authors: Kevin Burke, Associate Professor in Statistics, University of Limerick and David O’Sullivan, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Limerick Recently, a cheerful 100-year-old message in a bottle was found on the south-west coast of Australia. In it, a world war one soldier proclaimed to be “as happy as Larry”. If you’re a […]