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Molecules that are twisted are ubiquitous in nature, and have important consequences in biology, chemistry, physics and medicine. Some molecules have unique and technologically useful optical properties; the medicinal properties of drugs depend on the direction of the twist; and within us – think of the double helix – twisted DNA can interact with different proteins.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new chemical technique for depositing a non-crystalline form of silicon into the long, ultra-thin pores of optical fibers has been developed by an international team of scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom. The technique, which is the first of its kind to use high-pressure chemistry for making well-developed films and wires of this particular kind of silicon semiconductor, will help scientists to make more-efficient and more-flexible optical fibers. The findings, by an international team led by John Badding, a professor of chemistry at Penn State University, will be published in a future print edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

A team of scientists have made it easier to study atomic or subatomic-scale properties of the building blocks of matter (which also include protons, neutrons and electrons) known as fermions by slowing down the movement of a large quantity of gaseous atoms at ultra-low temperature.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have nearly eliminated the space in which the Higgs boson could dwell, scientists announced in a seminar held at CERN today. However, the ATLAS and CMS experiments see modest excesses in their data that could soon uncover the famous missing piece of the physics puzzle.

Last month, the preparations for the assembly of the NOvA neutrino detector passed a pivotal test in an assembly building at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists collaborating on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva – will announce their latest results in the search for the Higgs boson particle on Tuesday 13 December.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers have set a new world record for data transfer, helping to usher in the next generation of high-speed network technology. At the SuperComputing 2011 (SC11) conference in Seattle during mid-November, the international team transferred data in opposite directions at a combined rate of 186 gigabits per second (Gbps) in a wide-area network circuit. The rate is equivalent to moving two million gigabytes per day, fast enough to transfer nearly 100,000 full Blu-ray disks—each with a complete movie and all the extras—in a day.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador have found that, at just the right temperatures, nanoclusters form and improve the flow of electrical current through certain oxide materials.

Scientists are quivering with anticipation - flying halfway around the world for a close-up view of the action and devouring the latest updates from the blogosphere the way some girls track the doings of Justin Bieber.

Microscopic water droplets jumping from one surface to another may hold the key to a wide array of more energy efficient products, ranging from large solar panels to compact laptop computers.

Spin valves are essential building blocks in the magnetic sensors of read heads in hard disk drives. They consist of two magnetic layers separated by a non-magnetic layer and act as valves for electrons depending on the relative alignment of the magnetization (spin) in the magnetic layers. With the continuous push to boost the storage density of disk drives, it has become increasingly important to shield each individual sensor from the magnetic flux of adjacent bits

What would be a case for the repair shop for a car engine is completely normal for a micro engine. If it sputters, this is caused by the thermal motions of the smallest particles, which interfere with its running

The fundamental resource that drives a quantum computer is entanglement—the connection between two distant particles which Einstein famously called 'spooky action at a distance'.

By studying the behavior of tiny particles at an interface between oil and water, researchers at Harvard have discovered that stabilized emulsions may take longer to reach equilibrium than previously thought.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The primary objective of NASA’s Kepler satellite, which was launched in March 2009 to orbit the Sun, is to search for Earth-like planets in a portion of the Milky Way galaxy. But now a team of physicists has proposed that Kepler could have a second appealing purpose: to either detect or rule out primordial black holes (PBHs) of a certain mass range as the primary constituent of dark matter.