Emily Conover

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Emily Conover

The Swiss cheese known as Tête de Moine or “monk’s head” is served in a peculiar fashion. A specially designed blade scrapes off thin slices of the cheese wheel, rotating around its surface like a hand of a clock. This process forms thin, frilly cheese rosettes. Now, scientists have uncovered the physics behind these cheese flowers. It all comes down to the friction between the cheese and the blade, physicist Jishen Zhang and colleagues report in a paper accepted to Physical Review Letters.

3 weeks ago | snexplores.org | Emily Conover

acoustic: Having to do with sound or hearing. colleague: Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member. develop: To emerge or to make come into being, either naturally or through human intervention, such as by manufacturing. dimension: Descriptive features of something that can be measured, such as length, width or time. Helmholtz resonator: Named for the 19th century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, this is basically some hollow volume of air with a short, narrow neck.

4 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Emily Conover

If imitation is a form of flattery, then scientists are enamored with the axion. The hypothetical subatomic particle has long eluded scientists. But it’s now been conjured up in imitation form within a thin sheet of material, researchers report April 16 in Nature. If axions exist, they could explain dark matter, an invisible form of matter inferred from observations of the cosmos. But efforts to spot the particles have been unsuccessful. The newfound axion imitators are the next best thing.

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Emily Conover

Neutrinos are known to have tiny masses. A new result proclaims the subatomic particles to be even tinier still. The electrically neutral particles, produced in radioactive decays and in reactions in the sun and elsewhere in the cosmos, have a mass of less than 0.45 electron volts, physicists report in the April 11 Science. The result, from the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino, or KATRIN, experiment slashes the experiment’s previous upper limit for neutrino mass by nearly half.

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Emily Conover

There’s a newfound mismatch between matter and antimatter. And that could bring physicists one step closer to understanding how everything in the universe came to be. For the most part, particles and their oppositely charged antiparticles are like perfect mirror images of one another. But some particles disobey this symmetry, a phenomenon known as charge-parity, or CP, violation.