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Editor's Note: Reprinted from How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser. Copyright (c) 2011 by David Kaiser.

Using computer simulations, a Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) researcher has shown that the oxygen molecule (O2) is stable up to pressures of 1.9 terapascal, which is about nineteen million times higher than atmosphere pressure. Above that, it polymerizes, i.e. builds larger molecules or structures.

Scientists have created a new algorithm to detect virtual communities, designed to match the needs of real-life social, biological or information networks detection better than with current attempts. The results of this study by Lovro Šubelj and his colleague Marko Bajec from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia have just been published in European Physical Journal B.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The transition-metal monoxide FeO is an archetypal example of a Mott insulator—a material that should conduct electricity under conventional band theories but becomes an insulator when measured, especially at low temperatures—and a major iron-bearing component of the Earth’s interior. Understanding the high-pressure behavior of this material is important for both solid-state physics and Earth science.

In this dramatized film, Scientifc American editors George Musser and John Matson try to fool a colleague into thinking their brains are quantum-entangled.

Bionic eyes and limbs made television's six million dollar man an icon, but new research suggests our existing biological structure already exhibits a valuable electrical property. Scientists have found that arteries react curiously to external electric fields, opening the door to minimally invasive detection and treatment of the U.S.'s number one killer -- heart disease.

(PhysOrg.com) -- New research from the University of Bristol may disprove a long-standing conjecture made by one of the founders of quantum information science: that quantum states featuring ‘positive partial transpose’, a particular symmetry under time-reversal, can never lead to nonlocality.

UCLA researchers have explained the puzzling disappearing act of energetic electrons in Earth's outer radiation belt, using data collected from a fleet of orbiting spacecraft.

One day in 2010, Rutgers physicist Vitaly Podzorov watched a store employee showcase a kitchen gadget that vacuum-seals food in plastic.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The stock price of a company continuously changes, going up or down depending on the collective activity of a large number of investors.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have long been enamored by the gecko’s gravity defying ability to cling to walls and to let go at will, allowing it to walk around sideways, as have Spiderman enthusiasts.

Water (H2O) has a simple composition, but its dizzyingly interconnected hydrogen-bonded networks make structural characterizations challenging. In particular, the organization of water surfaces—a region critical to processes in cell biology and atmospheric chemistry—has caused profound disagreements among scientists

At just over seven feet tall, Shaquille O’Neal is easy to spot in crowd. But the individual virus structures that give him, and us, a cold aren’t so easy to see.

The physical property of magnetism has historically been associated with metals such as iron, nickel and cobalt; however, graphite – an organic mineral made up of stacks of individual carbon sheets – has baffled researchers in recent years by showing weak signs of magnetism.

Does antimatter behave differently in gravity than matter? Physicists at the University of California, Riverside have set out to determine the answer. Should they find it, it could explain why the universe seems to have no antimatter and why it is expanding at an ever increasing rate.