Category Physics

Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo, with SpaceShipTwo attached, takes off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California on an earlier test flight. Credit: Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic’s new spaceship has made a successful first glide flight, a key step after a deadly crash of its predecessor two years ago, the spaceflight company said on Saturday. The new SpaceShipTwo, dubbed VSS Unity, was hoisted aloft by carrier airplane WhiteKnightTwo VMS Eve from the Mojave Air & Space Port in California, the company said on Twitter.

Released from the mothership, VSS Unity flew home to Earth on its own, according to the company owned by British billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson. “VSS Unity has landed...

Graphic depicts the tethered enzymes and free-floating enzymes. Credit: Cornell University

Just like workers in a factory, enzymes can create a final product more efficiently if they are stuck together in one place and pass the raw material from enzyme to enzyme, assembly line-style. That’s according to scientists at Cornell’s Baker Institute for Animal Health, the first team to recreate a 10-step biological pathway with all the enzymes tethered to nanoparticles. They were inspired to study how nanoparticles could gain biological functions through the enzymes that drive sperm tails, which turn sugar into lactate and energy so quickly that sperm can speed along at 5 body lengths/s

“Sperm have a highly efficient energy-producing system,” said Chinatsu Mukai, a postdoctoral research associate...

Argonne high-energy physicist Wei Gai and engineer Scott Doran work on a newly developed positron target that could help provide a key component for the proposed International Linear Collider. Credit: Wes Agresta/Argonne National Laboratory

Although a lot of time and effort in particle physics are devoted to finding ways to increase the energy of certain experiments, sometimes it is even more important to find ways to safely, quickly and easily remove energy from an experiment. Researchers at the U.S. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory have recently developed a new ultra-low-friction sliding contact mechanism that uses chilled water to remove heat from a key component of a next-generation collider.

For the past two years, Gai et al have been attempting to assemble a working prototype for a ...

The highly sensitive magnetic field sensor. (Photograph: ETH Zurich / Peter Rüegg)

Researchers have succeeded in measuring tiny changes in strong magnetic fields with unprecedented precision. In their experiments, the scientists magnetised a water droplet inside an MRI scanner, a device that is used for medical imaging. They were able to detect even the tiniest variations of the magnetic field strength within the droplet. These changes were up to a trillion times smaller than the 7 tesla field strength of the MRI scanner used in the experiment.

“Until now, it was possible only to measure such small variations in weak magnetic fields,” says Klaas Prüssmann, Professor of Bioimaging at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich...