Energy & Particles : Science World Report

Mar 08, 2012 02:01 PM EST

Ultrafast Sonograms Shed New Light on Rapid Phase Transitions

An international team of physicists has developed a method for taking ultrafast 'sonograms' that can track the structural changes that take place within solid materials in trillionth-of-a-second intervals as they go through an important physical process called a phase transition.

Mar 08, 2012 01:42 PM EST

National Building Audit to Reset Crucial Energy Use Benchmarks

Long-delayed effort by EIA will quantify a decade of energy efficiency gains and focus decision-makers around higher standards. By Maria Gallucci, InsideClimate News The recent explosion of efficiency efforts across the country has slashed energy use in U.S. buildings, but by how much, exactly? A...

Mar 08, 2012 11:39 AM EST

Researchers Capture First-ever Images of Atoms Moving in a Molecule

Using a new ultrafast camera, researchers have recorded the first real-time image of two atoms vibrating in a molecule. Key to the experiment, which appears in this week's issue of the journal Nature, is the researchers' use of the energy of a molecule's own electron as a kind of "flash bulb" to ...

Mar 08, 2012 11:22 AM EST

Proposed Nuclear Clock may Keep Time with the Universe

A proposed new time-keeping system tied to the orbiting of a neutron around an atomic nucleus could have such unprecedented accuracy that it neither gains nor loses 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years - the age of the Universe.

Mar 08, 2012 10:17 AM EST

Discovery of a New Kind of Neutrino Transformation

The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, a multinational collaboration operating in the south of China, today reported the first results of its search for the last, most elusive piece of a long-standing puzzle: how is it that neutrinos can appear to vanish as they travel? The surprising answer open...

Mar 07, 2012 04:46 PM EST

Elusive Higgs Boson in Sight?

After 40 years of searching, physicists have the elusive Higgs boson in their sights. Wade Fisher, Michigan State University assistant professor of physics, presented the team's results today at a physics conference in La Thuile, Italy.

Mar 07, 2012 03:19 PM EST

Nanotrees Harvest the Sun's Energy to Turn Water into Hydrogen Fuel

University of California, San Diego electrical engineers are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy without using fossil fuels and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation. Reporting in the journal Nanoscale, the team said nanowires, which are made from abun...

Mar 07, 2012 02:18 PM EST

The First Spectroscopic Measurement of an Anti-atom

The ALPHA collaboration at CERN in Geneva has scored another coup on the antimatter front by performing the first-ever spectroscopic measurements of the internal state of the antihydrogen atom. Their results are reported in a forthcoming issue of Nature and are now online. Ordinary hydrogen atoms...

Mar 07, 2012 08:34 AM EST

Was Einstein Wrong - or was the Cable Loose?

The world of science was upended last year when an experiment appeared to show one of Einstein's fundamental theories was wrong - but now the lab behind it says the result could have been caused by a loose cable.

Mar 07, 2012 08:20 AM EST

Scientists at U.S. Lab Detect Hints of Elusive Particle

Scientists said they have gotten even closer to proving the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle" that supplies mass to matter and would complete Albert Einstein's theory of the universe.

Mar 06, 2012 04:33 PM EST

Capitalism Is Evolving, But Into What?

This is an excerpt from Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere, published this month by Harvard Business Review Press.

Mar 06, 2012 08:14 AM EST

God, Richard Dawkins, and the Meaning of Life

Two clever men, long past the first flush of youth, took part in a debate on God's place - or absence - in the meaning and origin of life last week in Oxford. They differed; and to no one's surprise, each remained unconvinced by the other's argument at its end. Oxford University has been hosting suc...