Lisa Zyga

If a hard-boiled egg is spun fast enough on a table, it will slowly stand upright as it continues to spin. Although the spinning egg rises due to the force of friction between the egg and the table, the full explanation involves ...

Researchers have discovered that input-output maps, which are widely used throughout science and engineering to model systems ranging from physics to finance, are strongly biased toward producing simple outputs. The results ...

Researchers have demonstrated the first quantum light-emitting diode (LED) that emits single photons and entangled photon pairs with a wavelength of around 1550 nm, which lies within the standard telecommunications window. ...

By attaching a transparent nanogenerator to a silicon solar cell, researchers have designed a device that harvests solar energy in sunny conditions and the mechanical energy of falling raindrops in rainy conditions. The dual ...

In the original Maxwell's demon thought experiment, a demon makes continuous measurements on a system of hot and cold reservoirs, building up a thermal gradient that can later be used to perform work. As the demon's measurements ...

The ability to etch nanostructures onto the surface of diamond is expected to have a wide variety of potential applications, but so far etching and patterning diamond at the nanoscale has been challenging, as diamond is highly ...

Researchers have designed a light-harvesting funnel that absorbs sunlight from any direction and concentrates it onto smaller areas, such as high-performance solar cells. By stacking multiple funnels, each tuned to a different ...

Classically, information travels in one direction only, from sender to receiver. In a new paper, however, physicists Flavio Del Santo at the University of Vienna and Borivoje Dakić at the Austrian Academy of Sciences have ...

Researchers have demonstrated that tiny micrometer-sized crystals—just barely visible to the human eye—can "walk" inchworm-style across the slide of a microscope. Other crystals are capable of different modes of locomotion ...

Atoms are the basic building blocks of all matter—at least, that is the conventional picture. In a new study, researchers have fabricated the first superatomic 2-D semiconductor, a material whose basic units aren't atoms ...

Currently, more than 80 nanotechnologies have been approved for a variety of medical applications, from treating cancer to bioimaging to tissue remodeling.

Traditionally, a quantum harmonic oscillator model is used to describe the tiny vibrations in a diatomic molecule, but the description is also universal in the sense that it can be extended to a variety of other situations ...

Physicists have extended one of the most prominent fluctuation theorems of classical stochastic thermodynamics, the Jarzynski equality, to quantum field theory. As quantum field theory is considered to be the most fundamental ...

Researchers have developed a new type of organic vortex laser, which is a laser that emits a helical beam of light. In the future, miniature arrays of these vortex lasers, each with a slightly different spiral shape, may ...

The phenomenon of ionic wind has been known about for centuries: by applying a voltage to a pair of electrodes, electrons are stripped off nearby air molecules, and the ionized air collides with neutral air molecules as it ...