Category Physics

1. The northern clingfish (Gobiesox maeandricus) lives in Pacific Northwest waters, where it seeks out prey in the crashing waves of the intertidal Credit: Petra Ditsche 2. Credit: Christina Linkem

To create prototype suction cups that are capable of glomming onto rough, wet surfaces and staying there, Ditsche has found inspiration in clingfish. On the rocky shores of Washington State, clingfish maneuver over rocks to prey on limpets – dime-sized, snail-like invertebrates. A limpet is covered by a shell shield that hides soft organs, which are fair game if the predatory clingfish can pop it off the rock. Yet the clingfish faces its own foe: heavy forces from incoming waves that threaten to slosh it off the rocks as it searches for food...

FImage: PPPL physicist Hantao Ji in front of the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment
Credit: Elle Starkmann

Physicists at DOE PPPL have for the first time directly observed a phenomenon that had previously only been hypothesized to exist. The phenomenon, plasmoid instabilities that occur during collisional magnetic reconnection, had until this year only been observed indirectly using remote-sensing technology. They created the phenomenon where they could measure it directly and confirm its existence on the electron scale, which describes the range of motion of electrons and how quickly they move.

Plasmoid instabilities create magnetic bubbles within plasma, superhot gas whose atoms have separated into electrons and atomic nuclei...

A new modular compute platform called the Compute Card

We may be about to enter a brand new age of tiny computing. Tech blog MSPoweruser said on Thursday that “At CES 2017 today, Intel announced a new modular compute platform called the Compute Card.” A BBC presenter points in the video to a “fully functional Windows 10 PC. “And when I say this, I actually mean this.” He reaches for a small slab, and tells viewers that it is a complete computer. Processer, storage, memory, Wifi, there. “It is about as powerful as an ultra-thin laptop,” he said.

The Intel Compute Card can operate as a PC or act as the brains of other electronics. The card does not seem to have—anywhere to plug anything in...

A researcher demonstrates the efficacy of a flexible transistor, as it is stretched, twisted and poked. Credit: J. Xu et al., Science (2016)

Researchers have created a stretchy transistor that can be elongated to twice its length with only minimal changes in its conductivity. The development is a valuable advancement for the field of wearable electronics. To date, it has been difficult to design a transistor using inherently stretchable materials that maintains its conductivity upon being stretched. Jie Xu devised a clever and scalable way to confine organic conductors inside a rubbery polymer to create stretchy transistors. They took a semiconducting polymer, called DPPT-TT, and confined it inside another polymer, SEBS, which has elastic properties.

As the two polymers don’t like to mix w...