One way to get drugs through the blood-brain barrier: smuggle them across using sound waves. The blood-brain barrier, a name given to the tightly packed vascular cells in the brain’s capillaries, keeps the central nervous system remarkably free of most pathogens. But that defense is a major challenge for delivering drugs that treat brain disorders. […]
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November is election time, and not only for voters in the United States. On November 16, hundreds of scientists will gather in Paris, France, for the most unusual election this year, if not this century. Maybe ever. The voting scientists won’t be choosing new leaders or passing new laws. They’ll be voting on something more
Scientist vote to fix the world’s weight-loss problem Read More »
How much beauty does it take to launch a ship? Howmuch does a male physicist’s beard grow in a second?And what is the optimal length of a lecture? Thesemay not seem like typical phenomena you need tomeasure, but they’ve nonetheless inspired creativesouls to forge new units of measurement.They are just some of the weird scales
Some of the smallest, most useful machines known to science are the biological molecules that keep living things living. The protein myosin drives the contraction and relaxation of muscle. Kinesin drags cellular cargo around the cell. Motor enzymes unwind, rewind, and maintain DNA, and bacteria use a molecular motor to rotate their whip-like flagella up
What’s the best way to build a molecular machine? Read More »
The tallest known tree in the world is in Redwood National Park, a few hundred kilometres north of San Francisco, just inland from the Pacific coast. You won’t find its location marked on official hiking maps, however. That’s because the two amateur naturalists who discovered the tree in 2006 – Michael Taylor and Chris Atkins – have tried to keep
Top Tips fom Tree Tops Read More »
The antagonists in video games tend to be monsters or zombies, but Quantum Moves pits players against the fundamental laws of nature. The player’s goal is straightforward: Move an atom from one place to another as quickly and efficiently as possible while a timer counts down the seconds.Waves represent the changing probability distribution of the
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Something about going to Mars has captivated the space-curious for generations; from scientists who want to build the spaceships and go, to politicians who can approve the spending. “Mankind is drawn to the heavens for the same reason we were once drawn into unknown lands and across the open sea,” said US President George W
The long road to Mars Read More »
Robert Kremens fights fire with fire. No, really – that’s his job. Kremens sets fires in a host of locations across the US. In April he drove 18 hours from his home in Rochester, New York, to Tall Timbers, a research station in Tallahassee, Florida, to set three or four fires. In mid-May he travelled
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If you’re interested in the smallest things known to scientists, there’s something you should know. They are extraordinarily ill-behaved. But that’s to be expected. Their home is the quantum world. These subatomic bits of matter don’t follow the same rules as objects that we can see, feel or hold. These entities are ghostly and strange.
The quantum world is mind-bogglingly weird Read More »
A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), the first of which was shown experimentally 22 years ago, isn’t your garden variety state of matter. It formed at a fraction above absolute zero and only in atoms that act like bosons, one of two types of fundamental particles. Bosons don’t follow the Pauli exclusion principle, which prohibits two particles
How Bose–Einstein condensates keep revealing weird physics Read More »
