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A piece of stony-iron meteorite sits on a display during a press conference, Friday, Jan. 19, 2018, at the Longway Planetarium in Flint, Mich. Longway Planetarium astronomers have located three meteorites, after a meteor broke apart about 20 miles over Earth Tuesday. Most of the meteorite’s fragments landed in Hamburg Township, Mich. The meteor will be sent to NASA for analysis. (Bronte Wittpenn/The Flint Journal-MLive.com via AP)

Meteorite hunters who flocked to Detroit from across the U.S. after a meteor exploded are finding the fragments. The 6-foot-wide meteor broke apart Tuesday about 20 miles over Earth, NASA scientists said. Most of the fragments landed in Hamburg Township...

Northwestern University researchers have developed a new method to precisely arrange nanoparticles of different sizes and shapes in two and three dimensions, resulting in optically active superlattices. Credit: Northwestern University

Technique could lead to new classes of materials that can bend light, such as for those used in cloaking devices. Northwestern University researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind technique for creating entirely new classes of optical materials and devices that could lead to light bending and cloaking devices – news to make the ears of Star Trek’s Spock perk up. Using DNA as a key tool, the interdisciplinary team took gold nanoparticles of different sizes and shapes and arranged them in two and three dimensions to form optically active superlattices...

Six years ago, Jiaxing Huang discovered crumpled graphene balls — novel ultrafine particles that resemble crumpled paper balls. Credit: Jiaxing Huang

Approach avoids lithium dendrite growth. “In current batteries, lithium is usually atomically distributed in another material such as graphite or silicon in the anode,” explains Northwestern University’s Jiaxing Huang. “But using an additional material ‘dilutes’ the battery’s performance. Lithium is already a metal, so why not use lithium by itself?” The answer is a challenge scientists have spent years trying to overcome. As lithium gets charged and discharged in a battery, it starts to grow dendrites and filaments, “which causes a number of problems,” Huang said. “At best, it leads to rapid degradation of the battery’s performance...

This image shows a visual representation of one of the highest-energy neutrino detections superimposed on a view of the IceCube Lab at the South Pole. Credit: IceCube Collaboration

For the first time, a science experiment has measured Earth’s ability to absorb neutrinos – the smaller-than-an-atom particles that zoom throughout space and through us by the trillions every second at nearly the speed of light. The experiment was achieved with the IceCube detector, an array of 5,160 basketball-sized sensors frozen deep within a cubic kilometer of very clear ice near the South Pole.

“This achievement is important because it shows, for the first time, that very-high-energy neutrinos can be absorbed by something – in this case, the Earth,” said Doug Cowen, professor of physics and astronomy & as...