A newly identified insulating material using the symmetry principles behind wallpaper patterns may provide a basis for quantum computing, according to an international team of researchers. This strontium-lead sample (Sr2Pb3) has a fourfold Dirac cone surface state, a set of four, two-dimensional electronic surface states that go away from a point in momentum space in straight lines. Credit: Image courtesy of Benjamin Wieder, Princeton University Department of Physics

An international team of scientists has discovered a new, exotic form of insulating material with a metallic surface that could enable more efficient electronics or even quantum computing...

The SwRI-led team processed solar coronal images to reveal universal gusts, jets and streams (green) emanating from the Sun, offering a possible explanation for the gusty solar wind found around Earth. The upcoming Parker Solar Probe will fly through this riotous torrent as the first spacecraft ever designed to ‘touch’ the Sun.
Credit: Image Courtesy of NASA/SwRI/STEREO

A SWRI-led team discovered never-before-detected, fine-grained structures in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The team imaged this critical region in detail using sophisticated software techniques and longer exposures from the COR-2 camera on board NASA’s Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory-A (STEREO-A).

The Sun’s outer corona is the source of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles that flow outward fr...

Cans of soft drink. Cooling frozen and with water drops

Drinking artificially sweetened beverages is associated with a significantly lower risk of colon cancer recurrence and cancer death, a team of investigators led by a Yale Cancer Center scientist has found. The study was published today in PLOS ONE.

“Artificially sweetened drinks have a checkered reputation in the public because of purported health risks that have never really been documented,” said the study’s senior author, Charles S. Fuchs, M.D., director of Yale Cancer Center. “Our study clearly shows they help avoid cancer recurrence and death in patients who have been treated for advanced colon cancer, and that is an exciting finding.”

Fuchs and his team of researchers found that in the 1,018-patient analysis, those participants ...

Illustration of Parker Solar Probe circling the Sun.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

This summer, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will launch to travel closer to the Sun, deeper into the solar atmosphere, than any mission before it. If Earth was at one end of a yard-stick and the Sun on the other, Parker Solar Probe will make it to within four inches of the solar surface. Inside that part of the solar atmosphere, a region known as the corona, Parker Solar Probe will provide unprecedented observations of what drives the wide range of particles, energy and heat that course through the region – flinging particles outward into the solar system and far past Neptune.

Inside the corona, it’s also, of course, unimaginably hot...