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(PhysOrg.com) -- What causes a magnet to be a magnet, and how can we control a magnet's behavior? These are the questions that University at Buffalo researcher Igor Zutic, a theoretical physicist, has been exploring over many years.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A Swinburne University professor was part of a team that showed that drag on hot bodies moving through liquid can be radically reduced by up to 85 per cent, potentially doubling their speed.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Direct evidence of the existence of gravitational waves is something that has long eluded researchers, however new research has suggested that adding just one of the proposed detectors in Japan, Australia and India will drastically increase the expected rate of detection.

It might not seem like scraping the top of a cold stick of butter with a knife could be a scientific test, but engineers at MIT say the process is very similar to the "scratch test," which is perhaps the oldest known way to assess a material's hardness and strength — or, in scientific language, its resistance to deformation.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of physicists at the University of Innsbruck, led by Philipp Schindler and Rainer Blatt, has been the first to demonstrate a crucial element for a future functioning quantum computer: repetitive error correction. This allows scientists to correct errors occurring in a quantum computer efficiently. The researchers have published their findings in the scientific journal Science.

The long, slow decay of carbon-14 allows archaeologists to accurately date the relics of history back to 60,000 years.

Vanderbilt University engineers have created a "spongy" silicon biosensor that shows promise not only for medical diagnostics, but also for the detection of dangerous toxins and other tiny molecules in the environment. This innovation was originally designed to detect the presence of particular DNA sequences, which can be extremely helpful in identifying whether or not a person is predisposed to heart disease or certain kinds of cancer. The new sensor is described in the Optical Society's open access journal, Optics Express.

The move toward smarter, lighter and more powerful electronics, computers and smartphones depends on whether transistor circuits, the building blocks of such devices, can process large amounts of information.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the future, physicists will be able to follow a new lead in their search for new materials for electronic components, for example.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Space scientists working to solve one cosmic mystery at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., now have the capability to better understand unidentified matter in deep space. Using a new facility so sensitive that it can recognize the molecular structure of particles in space, researchers now are able to track unidentified matter seen for the last century absorbing certain wavelengths of light from distant stars.

Scientists at Imperial College London have made the most accurate measurement yet of the shape of the humble electron, finding that it is almost a perfect sphere, in a study published in the journal Nature today.

The lab, though it may seem quiet and insulated, can be as full of background noise as a crowded train station when we're trying to catch the announcements. Our brains can filter out the noise and focus on the message up to a certain point, but turning up the volume on the loudspeakers – improving the signal-to-noise ratio – helps as well.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The three LHC-experiments (ALICE, ATLAS and CMS), which study lead-collisions have presented their latest results at the international Quark Matter 2011 conference, held in Annecy in France with over 750 participants from all over the world. The results are based on the analysis of new data from November-December 2010, when the LHC collided lead ions at approximately 14 times higher energy than was previously possible.

QD Laser, Fujitsu Laboratories, and the Institute for Nano Quantum Information Electronics, the University of Tokyo today announced the world's first successful operation of a 1.3

(PhysOrg.com) -- Imagine sitting down for your early morning coffee when your nice little suburban morning is disrupted by the sound of highway traffic from a quarter mile away. When you purchased your home far from the freeway, the last thing you expected to hear was the roar of traffic, but according to a new study presented at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Nick Ovenden from University College London says that is exactly what can happen when the right temperatures and wind conditions are present.