Atom scattering at low energies has a long history as a useful probe of surface properties. The most common atomic projectiles are helium atoms formed into a monoenergetic beam directed toward the surface with energies in the thermal range, meaning kinetic energies less than 100 meV. From ordered surfaces the scattered spectra consist of sharp […]
Little children with autism have more lead and less zinc and manganese than children of the same age without autism. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications and has been carried out by a team from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) […]
Author: Teresa E. Gimeno is an Ikerbasque Research Fellow at The Basque Centre for Climate Change One of the expected effects of rising atmospheric CO 2 concentration in the atmosphere is an increase in plant water use efficiency. This is due to the expected enhancement of photosynthesis under future atmospheric CO 2 concentrations, together with […]
Many methods can be used to synthesise non-molecular inorganic solids. Some solids can be prepared by a variety of routes but others, especially those that are not thermodynamically stable, may be much more difficult to prepare and may require special methods. Non-molecular inorganic solids can also be prepared in various forms, as fibres, films, foams […]
From nucleic acids to proteins and sugar chains, all life is made up of polymers, large molecules made up of sequences of small units called monomers. However, how these macromolecules first appeared on the surface of Earth is still controversial. It is generally assumed that, right before life started, our planet was covered in very […]
Each of the Voyager probes, two unmanned spacecrafts launched in 1977, has a gold-plated audio-visual disc, a recording that aims to introduce us to a possible alien and to show the diversity of living beings and cultures that planet Earth has. Carl Sagan said that «The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Quantum physics • Theoretical physics
The wave nature of light expresses itself in the propagation all over space, showing an intrinsic limitation to be localized beyond the so-called diffraction limit which is of the order of half the wavelength of the photons propagating. However when interacting with matter, light often gets reflected, diffracted, scattered or absorbed depending on the interactions […]
Why people younger than 22 with congenital or acquired heart conditions should be more likely of developing a cancer? Actually, a small number of studies have been published, suggesting relatively high cancer incidence and mortality, compared to the general population. If it is true a correlation exists, there are several potential explanations. It could be […]
The concept of moduli space is of utmost relevance in theoretical physics and mathematics, especially in geometry, topology and string theory. A moduli space is, roughly speaking, a space that classifies a given class of objects modulo an equivalence relation # which identifies the objects in that we want to consider as equivalent or, more […]
Since the discovery that graphene, the two dimensional carbon allotrope, can be isolated and incorporated into electronic devices intense research efforts have been triggered. Driving forces usually mentioned behind the experimental and theoretical studies of graphene are the exceptional electronic properties, in particular the high electron mobilities, the long spin coherence lengths and the possibility […]