The liver is, in most respects, forgiving. Damage it repeatedly with alcohol, or hepatitis, or bile that can’t drain, and it will scar. It will tighten and stiffen and lose its architecture over years of insult, eventually becoming the cirrhotic, shrunken organ that kills roughly two million people every year. But it does not simply … Read more
Inside a beam of light, there are places where the light simply isn’t. Not dim, not scattered, not absorbed. Absent, a void of zero intensity threading through the beam like a knotted vein of darkness. These are phase singularities: points where the electromagnetic phase becomes undefined, where the wave collapses into nothing. They dart through … Read more
Somewhere in a Japanese port, a shipping container hums. Inside it, a stack of ceramic wafers, each thinner than a credit card, is converting natural gas directly into electricity without combustion, without turbines, without the thermodynamic waste that haunts conventional power plants. The device is a solid oxide fuel cell, and at roughly 55 per … Read more
Boiling water destroys things. That, more or less, is the assumption underlying decades of nanomedicine research, which has largely ignored traditional herbal teas and decoctions as sources of therapeutic nanoparticles. Lipid membranes, the reasoning went, simply don’t survive prolonged exposure to 100 degrees Celsius. They rupture. They disintegrate. And so researchers seeking plant-derived nanoparticles have … Read more
A bat hanging from a cave ceiling is doing something that looks effortless but is, mechanically speaking, genuinely strange. It isn’t gripping. Not actively, anyway. When a bat lands inverted, its body weight pulls down on tendons running through the legs, and those tendons tighten the toes around whatever surface the animal has landed on. … Read more
A single bubble, roughly the width of a human hair, rises through a column of thick fluid. It is doing two things at once. As it ascends, it drags surrounding liquid upward with it, pulling material across centimeters of space in a broad, slow convection loop. And simultaneously, because a piezoelectric transducer bolted to the … Read more
Light hits a particle of indium oxide, and something unusual happens. The palladium clusters dotting its surface don’t just absorb the photons. They convert them into heat, raising the catalyst’s skin temperature to around 230 degrees Celsius within seconds, even though the source of illumination is nothing more exotic than simulated sunlight. That warmth is … Read more
Think about what happens inside a solar cell the moment light hits it. Photons jostle electrons loose from their atoms, and those electrons have to travel, quickly, through a crystalline lattice before they recombine and the energy is wasted as heat. In a tandem cell built from two stacked layers of perovskite, a man-made mineral … Read more
Every nerve fibre in your brain and spinal cord is wrapped in something a bit like electrical tape. The myelin sheath, as it’s called, is a fatty insulating layer produced by specialist cells called oligodendrocytes, and without it, nerve signals lose their speed and coherence. In multiple sclerosis, the immune system attacks this layer directly. … Read more
The needle goes in at a point called Shenshu, 5 millimetres to the side of the second lumbar vertebra, roughly at the small of the back. It is a stainless steel disposable, thinner than a syringe needle, and once the electrode clips are attached and the current set to pulse at 4 hertz and then … Read more
Tracking Chinese Research