Category Physics

The cold blast of an air conditioner can be a welcome relief as temperatures soar, but “A/C” units require large amounts of energy and can leak potent greenhouse gases. Today, scientists report an eco-friendly alternative — a plant-based film that gets cooler when exposed to sunlight and comes in a variety of textures and bright, iridescent colors. The material could someday keep buildings, cars and other structures cool without requiring external power.

The researchers will present their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

“To make materials that remain cooler than the air around them during the day, you need something that reflects a lot of solar light and doesn’t absorb it, which would transform energy from the light into heat,” says Silvia V...

A big step toward the development of dyes with long-wavelength near-infrared absorption. A research group has discovered that near-infrared absorbing dyes, which had previously been considered to have closed-shell electronic structures, have an intermediate electronic structure, between closed- and open-shell structures. They also found that as the wavelength of near-infrared light that can be absorbed becomes longer the contribution of open-shell forms increases within the dye. These newly discovered characteristics are expected to be utilized to develop new near-infrared absorbing dyes that can absorb longer wavelength near-infrared light.

Near-infrared light, whose wavelength is longer than visible light, is invisible and can pass through many substances...

Astrophysicists at the Institute for Advanced Study, the Flatiron Institute and their colleagues have leveraged artificial intelligence to uncover a better way to estimate the mass of colossal clusters of galaxies. The AI discovered that by just adding a simple term to an existing equation, scientists can produce far better mass estimates than they previously had.

The improved estimates will enable scientists to calculate the fundamental properties of the universe more accurately, the astrophysicists reported March 17, 2023, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s such a simple thing; that’s the beauty of this,” says study co-author Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, a research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) in...

Discovery promises to help physicists understand nature of universe’s most abundant particle. In a scientific first, a team led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine has detected neutrinos created by a particle collider. The discovery promises to deepen scientists’ understanding of the subatomic particles, which were first spotted in 1956 and play a key role in the process that makes stars burn.

The work could also shed light on cosmic neutrinos that travel large distances and collide with the Earth, providing a window on distant parts of the universe.

It’s the latest result from the For...