Impossible material with world record breaking surface area made by swedish researchers

Impossible material with world record breaking surface area made by swedish researchers: While ordered forms of magnesium carbonate, both with and without water in the structure, are abundant in nature, water-free disordered forms have been proven extremely difficult to make...
A Thursday afternoon in 2011, we slightly changed the synthesis parameters of the earlier employed unsuccessful attempts, and by mistake left the material in the reaction chamber over the weekend. Back at work on Monday morning we discovered that a rigid gel had formed and after drying this gel we started to get excited...
After having gone through a number of state of the art materials characterization techniques it became clear that we had indeed synthesized the material that previously had been claimed impossible to make...

The surprise theory of everything

The surprise theory of everything: The question is whether we can express the whole of physics simply by enumerating possible and impossible processes in a given situation. This is very different from how physics is usually phrased, in both the classical and quantum regimes, in terms of states of systems and equations that describe how those states change in time. The blind alleys down which the standard approach can lead are easiest to understand in classical physics, where the dynamical equations we derive allow a whole host of processes that patently do not occur - the ones we have to conjure up the laws of thermodynamics expressly to forbid, such as dye molecules reclumping spontaneously in water...

Apply this logic more generally, and time ceases to exist as an independent, fundamental entity, but one whose flow is determined purely in terms of allowed and disallowed processes. With it go problems such as that I alluded to earlier, of why the universe started in a state of low entropy. If states and their dynamical evolution over time cease to be the question, then anything that does not break any transformational rules becomes a valid answer.

Wasp has hints of a clockwork brain

Wasp has hints of a clockwork brain: A tiny wasp has brain cells so small, physics predicts they shouldn't work at all. These miniature neurons might harbour subtle modifications, or they might work completely differently from all other known neurons - mechanically...
...Of 528 axons measured, a third were less than 0.1 micrometre in diameter, an order of magnitude narrower than human axons. The smallest were just 0.045 μm...
...That makes the axon impossibly noisy...
...The tiny axons might each carry a long rigid rod stretching down the centre. Pulling the rod could create a physical rather than electrical trigger for the release of a chemical that passes the signal on to the neighbouring neuron...

From the Annals of the Impossible (Experimental Physics) | Wavewatching

From the Annals of the Impossible (Experimental Physics) | Wavewatching: What you don't expect are variations that follow a discernible pattern in the decay rate of a radioactive element, nor any correlation with outside events. But this is exactly what Jere H. Jenkins et al. found...

And now this surprising result of the sun's influence has been corroborated.
The latest research was a collaboration of Stanford and Purdue University with the Geological Survey of Israel, rather reputable research power-houses that make these results difficult to dismiss...

Gamma-Ray Bending Opens New Door for Optics

Gamma-Ray Bending Opens New Door for Optics: Theory says that gamma rays, being even more energetic than x-rays, ought to bypass orbiting electrons altogether; materials should not bend them at all and the refractive index for gamma rays should be almost equal to one...

ILL is a research reactor that produces intense beams of neutrons. Habs, Jentschel, and colleagues used one of its beams to bombard samples of radioactive chlorine and gadolinium to produce gamma rays. They directed these down a 20-meter-long tube to a device known as a crystal spectrometer, which funneled the gamma rays into a specific direction. They then passed half of the gamma rays through a silicon prism and into another spectrometer to measure their final direction, while they directed the other half straight to the spectrometer unimpeded. To the researchers' surprise, as they report in a paper due to be published this month in Physical Review Letters, gamma rays with an energy above 700 kiloelectronvolts are slightly bent by the silicon prism...

So what drives this new bending effect? Although he can't be sure, Habs believes it resides in the nuclei at the heart of the silicon atoms. Although electrons don't normally reside in nuclei because of the very strong electric fields there, quantum mechanics allows pairs of "virtual" electrons and antielectrons, or positrons, to blink briefly into existence and then recombine and disappear again. Habs thinks the sheer number of these virtual electron-positron pairs amplifies the gamma-ray scattering, which is normally negligible, to a detectable amount.