Subject
78 articles
At the dawn of recorded history, ancient Egyptians already used different colors of inks to highlight important messages on papyri. We studied the composition...
The combined hardness and toughness of bone cannot be explained by the mere mixture of proteins and calcium phosphate mineral. To solve this conundrum, a...
A magic square is a grid of numbers where every column and row sum up to the same number. We explain the “quantum jump” for magic squares, generalizing them to...
Using a trick inspired by noise-cancellation headphones, we have been able to control the motion of a millimeter-sized drum at the “quantum level”, even though...
A phonon is a quantum of atomic vibrations. According to quantum mechanics, these phonons are what allow heat to travel in any solid medium. The capacity of...
Stingless bee honey contains high levels of a rare special sugar called trehalulose, not normally found in in any other food. For the first time, this low...
An electronic “skin” can find applications in health care, robotics, and prosthetics, and can benefit the well-being, economy, and sustainability of our...
The blades in the turbine of a fighter jet aircraft can spin nearly one thousand times each second, but spinning any faster makes them explode. What is the...
Tasty “hoppy” beer is increasingly preferred by consumers. However, the hop plant is a demanding crop and it varies considerably in essential oil content. A...
Photons are intrinsically chargeless and non-magnetic. Using intrinsic properties of photons and a straightforward structure, we have created “synthetic...
The ever-increasing amount of digital data has led scientists to look for new ways of storing information efficiently. In the last years, a new field of...
There are numerous debilitating diseases of the gastrointestinal tract and these need to be accurately diagnosed before treatment. We developed a miniature...
Microrobots could perform medical procedures and serve as a non-invasive form of medical treatment. However, this would require an ability to change...
Our study into the sparking of grapes in microwave ovens reveals that the phenomenon has less to do with the electrical conductivity of grapes and everything...
Tiny fluorescent molecules, inspired by the color-changing lobster pigment, have been developed to visualize and measure the tension of various cellular...
Designed to move, sense and behave like desert ants, AntBot is a robot able to navigate autonomously without GPS. Fully 3d-printed, this open-source project...
Can we distinguish between Baroque period paintings and Impressionist paintings by only looking at the horizon’s position? We mathematically analyzed the...
A particle of light takes 247 zeptoseconds to cover the bond length of the hydrogen molecule. With a microscopic double-slit experiment, we have resolved this...
Instability is AI's Achilles’ heel. We show the following paradox: there are cases where stable and accurate AI exists, but it can never be trained by any...
We re-engineered the adhesive used by mussels to stick to surfaces like ship hull, rocks, and piers to create a powder that can kill pathogens. When hydrated,...
Teaching robots to handle objects gracefully and effortlessly like humans has remained a great challenge in robotics. We built new tools to understand the...
In situ non-invasive spectroscopic methods combined with synchrotron radiation X-ray techniques allowed us to unveil that moisture, but not light, is the main...
When most electricity will be generated from variable renewable energy sources storing large amounts of it from summer to winter will be required. We find that...
To understand why color is fading in precious artworks, the reproduction of ancient colors is a vital ingredient. This know-how was lost at the turn of the...
Polycatenanes are tiny chains, made by linking cyclic molecules together in a chain without using chemical bonds. They have been attracting attention as a...
Artificial intelligence is all the hype lately. Behind many of the mind-blowing breakthroughs of the past decade is a single workhorse: More compute. As...
Known as the ‘molecule of life’, DNA is found in every cell in our body, providing a set of instructions for the function and organization throughout our...
In recent years, scientists have discovered that many animals can sense the weak magnetic field of the earth and use it to help them navigate. Other studies...
Placed on hot solids, water does not only levitate, but it also self-propels!
Animal flight has fascinated people since eternity. Birds, bats, and insects all perform breath-taking aerobatic maneuvers when perching on a wind-swayed tree...
Hydrogen embrittlement is an obstacle for using metals in hydrogen fuel technologies. We found the origin of this effect by using a customized state-of-the-art...
A fixed point is a point that does not move when subjected to a given transformation. Theorems guaranteeing the existence of such points have a wide...
Our body has a vast amount of small blood vessels that deliver and take away wastes. These small blood vessels can clog in many diseases including malaria,...
Using some common household cleaning products lead to the formation of indoor pollutants. During realistic use, we observed for the first time that chemical...
Metal halide perovskites improve the efficiency of silicon solar cells by 30%.
Soft-bodied robots often crawl as slow as a caterpillar. How can we make soft robots run faster, like a cheetah? One solution is to add a flexible spine.
Technology has enabled the productions of small-scale fluid jets with precision nozzles and pumps, and pressurized tanks. These can be cumbersome, but nature...
One of the biggest questions of our time is how gravity and quantum mechanics interact. We have achieved a long-sought-after step towards this goal by laser...
When it comes to recycling, not all plastics are equal. While the world still struggles to manage recycling streams for simple plastics like PET, manufacturers...
The Earth’s climate is a complex, dynamic system and understanding of how it evolves still poses challenges. In a new study, researchers simplified Earth to a...
Lithium-Sulfur battery can store more energy than the commonly-used Li-ion battery. But the high capacity of the Sulfur electrode causes it too much stress and...
During development our organs take different distinct shapes. Recent results from our lab showed that under certain circumstances muscle cells collectively...
Chemists tend to take inspiration for innovation from nature. A team led by the Nobel Prize winner J. Fraser Stoddart developed a fully artificial molecular...
Imagine you spilled coffee over the spreadsheets containing your research data, and a large part of the data is completely unreadable. Before you throw away...
We developed a nanoscale device that can mimic human brain cells for vision, by combining two promising nanomaterials, graphene and perovskite quantum dots....
Most great discoveries are a result of happenstance. This is a story about a remarkably complex small molecule that can adopt either of two molecular shapes...
