Issues

The new materials bypass the need for costly heavy metals.

A model for groundwater flows reveals that merging tributaries have an affinity for the angle 2π/5.

When silica is driven by an ultraintense and ultrashort light pulse, its electrical conductivity can rise and fall by 18 orders of magnitude during a single optical cycle.

With summertime disappearance of polar sea ice expected as early as this decade, various geoengineering schemes have been proposed for mitigation. But each carries baggage.

If more experiments, in particular the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment, go forward, what scientists had hoped to get in one go will instead be realized incrementally.

Cells sense chemical gradients, communicate gradient information throughout the cell, and change their shape in response. Statistics, materials science, and more underlie thoseessential biological processes.

Stronger than steels but able to be shaped and molded like plastics, bulk metallic glasses are the quintessential engineering materials.

New techniques promise better forecasting of where damaging contaminants in the ocean or atmosphere will end up.

The 2012 transit of Venus gave us a chance to reproduce Mikhail Lomonosov’s 1761 observation and demonstrate the excellent quality of 18th-century telescopes.