As COVID-19 ravaged Wuhan, China, in January, scientists remained unsure how the virus was spreading so rapidly. Biophysicist Adriaan Bax, chatting over dinner with his linguist wife Ingrid Pufahl, started to suspect that the saliva we project as we speak … Continue reading
Journal Club
Highlighting recently published papers selected by Academy members
Category Archives: Applied Physical Sciences
Fluid dynamics work hints at whether spoken word can spread COVID-19
As of April 3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is advising that everyone—sick or healthy—wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Recent research on how fluids travel from our respiratory tracts when we sneeze, speak, or … Continue reading
Categories: Applied Physical Sciences | Immunology | Infectious disease | Journal Club | Medical Sciences
Tagged aerosol particles, coronavirus, cough, COVID-19, facemask, fluid dynamics, saliva, SARS-Cov-2, sneeze, social distancing
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Journal Club: The simple physics of stretching rubber bands surprises researchers, offers up potential application
Movie 2 – Classic strech dominated recoil When the researchers turned their high-speed camera on a rubber band being released, they discovered, to their surprise, that the shape of the back of the rubber band was round (top clip), and … Continue reading
Categories: Applied Physical Sciences | Journal Club | Physics
Tagged fluid dynamics, molecular device, physics, rubber band, satellite, trapezoid
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Journal Club: Giving the brain something to do highlights the circuitry of smarts
Scientists conducting neuroimaging studies hope that their MRI scans will offer up patterns that predict traits related to intelligence, personality, disease, or even offer insights into a patient’s clinical symptoms or their chances of responding to a drug. But according … Continue reading
Categories: Applied Physical Sciences | Journal Club | Neuroscience
Tagged Human Connectome Project, intelligence, MRI, neuroimaging, Raven's matrices, rest-state
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Journal Club: First observation of ‘superballistic’ electrons, flowing like a viscous fluid in graphene
Taking advantage of graphene’s special properties, physicists have experimentally observed a stream of record-breaking electrons that move with a conductance exceeding the limit theorists established decades ago. The researchers reported their findings recently in Nature Physics. For more than half … Continue reading
Categories: Applied Physical Sciences | Condensed Matter Physics | Journal Club | Quantum Mechanics
Tagged conductance, electrons, graphene, superballistic
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Journal Club: A physicist’s take on the age-old ecological puzzle of how species form communities
Ecologists have long searched for the rules that govern how individual species join together to form a community. Whether forest or desert, the problem is complex. Myriad factors influence a community’s composition and stability —from how strongly species compete to … Continue reading
Categories: Animal Behavior | Applied Physical Sciences | Ecology | Journal Club | Mathematics | Physics
Tagged ecological community, ecosystem, Lotka-Volterra equation, species interactions
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Journal Club: A new, twisted topological insulator
About a decade ago, physicists began identifying and probing materials that suffer something of an identity crisis. On the surface of these crystals, electrons flow and form currents, like in a conductor. But in the interior, electrons are pinned and … Continue reading
Journal Club: Super-sensitive new microscope uses ultracold atoms to image magnetic fields at high precision
In recent years, physicists have developed an arsenal of sensitive, high-resolution tools to probe the smallest magnetic fields, revealing nanoscale subtleties lost in larger-scale measurements. An understanding of these structures can offer insights into exotic quantum materials. A new microscope … Continue reading
Journal Club: Finding new ways to store higher-density information with ferroelectric materials
Recent findings suggest early proof of principle for a new way to read, write and erase information in much smaller areas than conventional memory. The method entails ferroelectric thin films, which store information using the domains’ polarization directions like the … Continue reading
Categories: Applied Physical Sciences | Journal Club | Physics
Tagged domains, ferroelectric, memory, tem
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New simple theory developed of plastic deformation of metals
Scientists would like to design high-strength structural materials, but much about this work depends on laborious trial and error due to the complexity of plastic deformation — that is, how materials can deform irreversibly. Now researchers propose a unified theory … Continue reading
Categories: Applied Physical Sciences
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C. elegans synchronized swimming
When a group of nematodes gets together in any kind of liquid, they put on quite a show. Each worm waves its body rhythmically to propel itself along. But the waving isn’t all random—in a dense group of Caenorhabditis elegans, … Continue reading