Bizarre Things: Matter & Energy

May 2, 2024

Top Headlines

This Highly Reflective Black Paint Makes Objects More Visible to Autonomous Cars

May 2, 2024 — Driving at night might be a scary challenge for a new driver, but with hours of practice it soon becomes second nature. For self-driving cars, however, practice may not be enough because the lidar ...

Significant New Discovery in Teleportation Research -- Noise Can Improve the Quality of Quantum Teleportation

May 2, 2024 — Researchers succeeded in conducting an almost perfect quantum teleportation despite the presence of noise that usually disrupts the transfer of quantum ...

Time Zones and Tiredness Strongly Influence NBA Results, Study of 25,000 Matches Shows

May 1, 2024 — The body clock has a significant impact on the performance of NBA players. Data shows vastly better win ratio for home teams from the Western Time Zone Area (PDT) when playing an EDT team, compared ...

The End of the Quantum Tunnel

Apr. 26, 2024 — Quantum mechanical effects such as radioactive decay, or more generally: 'tunneling', display intriguing mathematical patterns. Researchers now show that a 40-year-old mathematical discovery can be used to fully encode and understand this ...

Latest Headlines

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Random Robots Are More Reliable

May 2, 2024 — New algorithm encourages robots to move more randomly to collect more diverse data for learning. In tests, robots started with no knowledge and then learned and correctly performed tasks within a ...

Trotting Robots Reveal Emergence of Animal Gait Transitions

Apr. 30, 2024 — A four-legged robot trained with machine learning has learned to avoid falls by spontaneously switching between walking, trotting, and pronking -- a milestone for roboticists as well as biologists ...

Scientists Develop Strong Yet Reusable Adhesive from Smart Materials

Apr. 29, 2024 — Scientists have developed a smart, reusable adhesive more than ten times stronger than a gecko's feet adhesion, pointing the way for development of reusable superglue and grippers capable of holding ...

Why Can't Robots Outrun Animals?

Apr. 24, 2024 — Robotics engineers have worked for decades and invested many millions of research dollars in attempts to create a robot that can walk or run as well as an animal. And yet, it remains the case that ...

Researchers Show It's Possible to Teach Old Magnetic Cilia New Tricks

Apr. 24, 2024 — Magnetic cilia -- artificial hairs whose movement is powered by embedded magnetic particles -- have been around for a while, and are of interest for applications in soft robotics, transporting ...

Holographic Displays Offer a Glimpse Into an Immersive Future

Apr. 24, 2024 — Researchers have invented a new optical element that brings us one step closer to mixing the real and virtual worlds in an ordinary pair of eyeglasses using high-definition 3D holographic ...

Data-Driven Music: Converting Climate Measurements Into Music

Apr. 18, 2024 — A geo-environmental scientist from Japan has composed a string quartet using sonified climate data. The 6-minute-long composition -- entitled 'String Quartet No. 1 'Polar Energy Budget'-- is based on ...

Octopus Inspires New Suction Mechanism for Robots

Apr. 18, 2024 — A new robotic suction cup which can grasp rough, curved and heavy stone, has been developed by ...

How 3D Printers Can Give Robots a Soft Touch

Apr. 17, 2024 — Soft skin coverings and touch sensors have emerged as a promising feature for robots that are both safer and more intuitive for human interaction, but they are expensive and difficult to make. A ...

Two-Dimensional Nanomaterial Sets Record for Expert-Defying, Counter-Intuitive Expansion

Apr. 17, 2024 — Engineers have developed a record-setting nanomaterial which when stretched in one direction, expands perpendicular to the applied ...

A Single Atom Layer of Gold: Researchers Create Goldene

Apr. 16, 2024 — For the first time, scientists have managed to create sheets of gold only a single atom layer thick. The material has been termed goldene. According to researchers, this has given the gold new ...

Trapped in the Middle: Billiards With Memory

Apr. 11, 2024 — Adding one simple rule to an idealized game of billiards leads to a wealth of intriguing mathematical questions, as well as applications in the physics of living organisms. Researchers are ...

Star Trek's Holodeck Recreated Using ChatGPT and Video Game Assets

Apr. 11, 2024 — Star Trek's Holodeck is no longer just science fiction. Using AI, engineers have created a tool that can generate 3D environments, prompted by everyday ...

Revolutionary Molecular Device Unleashes Potential for Targeted Drug Delivery and Self-Healing Materials

Apr. 10, 2024 — In a new breakthrough that could revolutionise medical and material engineering, scientists have developed a first-of-its-kind molecular device that controls the release of multiple small molecules ...

Engineers Design Soft and Flexible 'Skeletons' for Muscle-Powered Robots

Apr. 8, 2024 — Engineers designed modular, spring-like devices to maximize the work of live muscle fibers so they can be harnessed to power biohybrid ...

'Smart Swarms' of Tiny Robots Inspired by Natural Herd Mentality

Apr. 3, 2024 — Researchers gave nanorobots a trait called adaptive time delay, which allows them to better work ...

Plastic-Free Vegan Leather That Dyes Itself Grown from Bacteria

Apr. 3, 2024 — Researchers have genetically engineered bacteria to grow animal- and plastic-free leather that dyes ...

Intelligent Liquid

Apr. 3, 2024 — Researchers have developed a programmable meta-fluid with tunable springiness, optical properties, viscosity and even the ability to transition between a Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid. The ...

Elastocaloric Cooling: Refrigerator Cools by Flexing Artificial Muscles

Apr. 2, 2024 — There is room for just one small bottle in the world's first refrigerator that is cooled with artificial muscles made of nitinol, a nickel-titanium alloy. But the mini-prototype is ...

AI Writing, Illustration Emits Hundreds of Times Less Carbon Than Humans, Study Finds

Apr. 2, 2024 — A group of scholars calculated the amount of energy used by AI tools for the tasks of writing and illustrating and compared it to the average amount of energy humans use for the same processes. Their ...

Robot, Can You Say 'Cheese'?

Mar. 27, 2024 — What would you do if you walked up to a robot with a human-like head and it smiled at you first? You'd likely smile back and perhaps feel the two of you were genuinely interacting. But how does ...

A Solar Cell You Can Bend and Soak in Water

Mar. 27, 2024 — Researchers have developed an organic photovoltaic film that is both waterproof and flexible, allowing a solar cell to be put onto clothes and still function correctly after being rained on or even ...

Micro-Lisa! Making a Mark With Novel Nano-Scale Laser Writing

Mar. 26, 2024 — High-power lasers are often used to modify polymer surfaces to make high-tech biomedical products, electronics and data storage components. Now researchers have discovered a light-responsive, ...

Scientists on the Hunt for Evidence of Quantum Gravity's Existence at the South Pole

Mar. 26, 2024 — An Antarctic large-scale experiment is striving to find out if gravity also exists at the quantum level. An extraordinary particle able to travel undisturbed through space seems to hold the ...

The World Is One Step Closer to Secure Quantum Communication on a Global Scale

Mar. 25, 2024 — Researchers have brought together two Nobel prize-winning research concepts to advance the field of quantum communication. Scientists can now efficiently produce nearly perfect entangled photon pairs ...

A Self-Cleaning Wall Paint

Mar. 25, 2024 — Beautiful white wall paint does not stay beautiful and white forever. Often, various substances from the air accumulate on its surface. This can be a desired effect because it makes the air cleaner ...

Artificial Nanofluidic Synapses Can Store Computational Memory

Mar. 25, 2024 — In a step toward nanofluidic-based neuromorphic -- or brain-inspired -- computing, engineers have succeeded in executing a logic operation by connecting two chips that use ions, rather than ...

Research Suggests How Turbulence Can Be Used to Generate Patterns

Mar. 20, 2024 — Physicists show how patterns can emerge from chaos in turbulent ...

Robotic Metamaterial: An Endless Domino Effect

Mar. 20, 2024 — If it walks like a particle, and talks like a particle... it may still not be a particle. A topological soliton is a special type of wave or dislocation which behaves like a particle: it can move ...

Molecular Crystal Motors Move Like Microbes When Exposed to Light

Mar. 19, 2024 — At first glance, Rabih Al-Kaysi's molecular motors look like the microscopic worms you'd see in a drop of pond water. But these wriggling ribbons are not alive; they're made from ...