Rice’s Lei Li wins NSF CAREER Award to develop a new generation of wearable medical imaging technology capable of visualizing deep tissue function in real time.

Instead of a tempest in a teapot, imagine the cosmos in a canister. Scientists have performed experiments using nested, spinning cylinders to confirm that an uneven wobble in a ring of electrically conductive fluid like liquid metal or plasma causes particles on the inside of the ring to drift inward. Since revolving rings of plasma also occur around stars and black holes, these new findings imply that the wobbles can cause matter in those rings to fall toward the central mass and form planets.

The scientists found that the wobble could grow in a new, unexpected way. Researchers already knew that wobbles could grow from the interaction between plasma and magnetic fields in a gravitational field. But these new results show that wobbles can more easily arise in a region between two jets of fluid with different velocities, an area known as a free shear layer.

Researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw and the University of British Columbia have described how a so-called lone spinon - an exotic quantum excitation that is a single unpaired spin - can arise in magnetic models. The discovery deepens our understanding of the nature of magnetism and could have implications for the development of future technologies such as quantum computers and new magnetic materials. The findings were published in the renowned journal “Physical Review Letters”.

Theoretical physicist Jonathan Heckman and Ph.D. student Rebecca Hicks at University of Pennsylvania put a spin on ideas related to testing string theory: Rather than looking to verify it, the team and their collaborators sought a novel way to falsify it with data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. “We're not rooting for string theory to fail,” Hicks says. “We're stress-testing it, applying more pressure to see if it holds up." “If string theory survives, fantastic," Heckman says. "If it snaps, we'll learn something profound about nature.”

The extent to which phase separation is involved in transcription has been contentious, with confounding arguments for the roles of small, soluble protein complexes and larger, phase-separated droplets. 

The intricate, hidden processes that sustain coral life are being revealed through a new microscope developed by scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The diver-operated microscope — called the Benthic Underwater Microscope imaging PAM, or BUMP — incorporates pulse amplitude modulated (PAM) light techniques to offer an unprecedented look at coral photosynthesis on micro-scales. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the new microscope will help scientists uncover precisely why corals bleach, and inform remediation efforts. While the bleaching process is known, it’s not fully understood, and it hasn’t been possible to study in depth in the field — until now.

 A team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame, Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston University has developed a technique for measuring a brain tumor’s mechanical force and a new model to estimate how much brain tissue a patient has lost.