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
When the Canyon Diablo meteorite punched through the Arizona desert some 50,000 years ago, it carried with it a strange passenger. Locked inside fragments of the impactor, crystallographers in the 1960s found what appeared to be a new form of carbon, structurally distinct from ordinary diamond, its atoms stacked in a different geometric pattern. They … Read more
Somewhere in a Guangzhou laboratory, a team of researchers has just finished mapping something that looks, from a distance, like a geopolitical fault line — except it runs through lines of code rather than continental crust. The fracture they’ve been tracing separates three distinct technological civilisations: American, Chinese and European. And according to their analysis, … Read more
Two adjacent fields in Jiangxi Province, China, grow different crops — one peanuts, one rice. The soils beneath them look similar enough: both acidic, both fertilised at similar rates, both collected from the same shallow depth. Mix biochar into either of them and you’d expect a broadly similar result. You’d be wrong. A new study … Read more
Inside a vacuum chamber in Hefei, China, a thread of glowing plasma hangs in space. Argon gas feeds into the device at five milligrams per second — barely a trickle. Electromagnetic forces tear the gas apart into ions and electrons, then hurl it backward at extraordinary speed. The thrust produced is, on its face, modest: … Read more
Tracking Chinese Research