Thin structures made of black phosphorus can tune the properties of light, with implications for science and technology. Most of us control light all the time without even thinking about it, usually in mundane ways: we don a pair of sunglasses and put on sunscreen, and close — or open — our window blinds.

But the control of light can also come in high-tech forms. The screen of the computer, tablet, or phone on which you are reading this is one example. Another is telecommunications, which controls light to create signals that carry data along fiber-optic cables.

Scientists also use high-tech methods to control light in the laboratory, and now, thanks to a new breakthrough that uses a specialized material only three atoms thick, they can control light more precisely than ever bef...

Hot Jupiters — giant gas planets that race around their host stars in extremely tight orbits — have become a little bit less mysterious thanks to a new study combining theoretical modeling with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

While previous studies mostly focused on individual worlds classified as “hot Jupiters” due to their superficial similarity to the gas giant in our own solar system, the new study is the first to look at a broader population of the st...

Totimorphic structural materials can achieve any shape. Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a shape-shifting material that can take and hold any possible shape, paving the way for a new type of multifunctional material that could be used in a range of applications, from robotics and biotechnology to architecture.

The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Today’s shape-shifting materials and structures can only transition between a few stable configurations but we have shown how to create structural materials that have an arbitrary range of shape-morphing capabilities,” said L Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and ...

New images have revealed detailed clues about how the first stars and structures were formed in the Universe and suggest the formation of the Galaxy got off to a fitful start.

An international team of astronomers from the University of Nottingham and Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) used data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), the so-called Frontier Fields, to locate and study some of the smallest faintest galaxies in the nearby universe. This has revealed the formation of the galaxy was likely to be fitful. The first results have just been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

One of the most interesting questions that astronomers have been trying to answer for decades is how and w...