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We drink it, swim in it, and our bodies are largely made of it. But as ubiquitous as water is, there is much that science still doesn't understand about this life-sustaining substance.

Physicists at Forschungszentrum J

Although high-temperature superconductors are widely used in technologies such as MRI machines, explaining the unusual properties of these materials remains an unsolved problem for theoretical physicists. Major progress in this important field has now been reported by physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a pair of papers published back-to-back in the July 29 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Spacetime analogs is an emerging field of physics in which scientists investigate systems having mathematical links with general relativity, and test their theories about the early behavior of the universe. The latest in a series of such experiments is one that uses spacetime analogs to model the end of time theory, dubbed the “Big Crunch,” at which the universe is predicted to contract and eventually collapse into a black hole.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their colleagues have discovered a new relation among electric and magnetic fields and differences in temperature, which may lead to more efficient thermoelectric devices that convert heat into electricity or electricity into heat.

International collaboration including MPQ scientists sets a new value for the antiproton mass relative to the electron with unprecedented precision.

Quantum memory is one of the basic building blocks needed for realizing a quantum computer one day. Atac Imamoglu, a professor of quantum electronics, and Renato Renner, a professor of theoretical physics, examined the issue of whether there can be long-term memory for quantum information at all using numerical models and theoretical analyses

(PhysOrg.com) -- "Many people are trying to build a quantum computer," Olivier Pfister tells PhysOrg.com. "One to the problems, though, is that you need hundreds of thousands of qubits.

While many hotel rooms, recording studios, and even some homes are built with materials to help absorb or reflect sound, mechanisms to truly control the direction of sound waves are still in their infancy. However, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have now created the first tunable acoustic diode-a device that allows acoustic information to travel only in one direction, at controllable frequencies.

Birmingham particle physicists are today trawling through the data from particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider that could indicate the existence of the Higgs boson.

(PhysOrg.com) -- When a spinning laser gyroscope is placed near a super-cooled rotating ring, the gyroscope accelerates a bit in the same direction as the ring, and scientists aren’t sure why.

Experiments at the world's biggest atom smasher have yielded tantalising hints that a long-sought sub-atomic particle truly exists, with final proof likely by late 2012, physicists said Monday.

For modern biologists, the ability to capture high-quality, three-dimensional (3D) images of living tissues or organisms over time is necessary to answer problems in areas ranging from genomics to neurobiology and developmental biology. The better the image, the more detailed the information that can be drawn from it.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Metamaterials researchers Yaroslav Urzhumov and David Smith, working at Duke University have built a simulation of an object that can move through water without leaving a trace and claim it's a concept that could be built and used in the real world provided more research is done. In their paper, published on arXiv, the two describe how they programmed the use of metamaterials applied to an object, along with tiny water pumps, into a model to simulate an actual object moving through water without dragging some of the water with it that would normally cause turbulence.

(PhysOrg.com) -- As early communications systems using quantum cryptography become commercially available, physicists have been investigating new types of security attacks in an effort to defend against them. In a recent study, researchers have identified and demonstrated a new, highly effective way to eavesdrop on a quantum key distribution (QKD) system that involves blinding the receiver’s detector during the "dead time" of single-photon detectors.