THz spectroscopy could help Explain water's anomalies

29-Jun-2018 - Liquid water sustains life on earth, but its physical properties remain mysterious among scientific researchers. Recently, a team of Swiss researchers used existing THz spectroscopy techniques to measure liquid water's hydrogen bonding. Future efforts with this technique could one day help ...

Discovering new field affecting metals solidification

05-Feb-2018 - A fundamental discovery that alters our current understanding of how metals solidify and form crystalline patterns may help lead to better control of casting and welding processes. It also explains how snowflakes and many mineral patterns form naturally. Reexamining data from his 20-year-old NASA ...

Studies of 'amorphous ice' reveal hidden order in glass

05-Oct-2017 - The waves at the bottom of old window panes are a reminder that solid glass behaves like a very slow-moving liquid. Now a new study challenges the notion that the atomic structure of glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid ­- at least for a certain kind of glass called "amorphous ice" ...

You won't find ice cubes like this in your freezer

How to make 'squarest' ice crystals ever

11-Jul-2017 - An international team of scientists has set a new record for creating ice crystals that have a near-perfect cubic arrangement of water molecules--a form of ice that may exist in the coldest high-altitude clouds but is extremely hard to make on Earth. The ability to make and study cubic ice in the ...

How soil bacteria can protect against corrosion in steel

08-Jun-2017 - A Swansea University researcher, Alex Harold, has beaten over 5000 applicants to win an international award for her work using proteins derived from soil bacteria to develop a new anti-corrosion coating for steel. Organised by Tata Group, the Tata Innovista competition highlights and rewards ...

Exploring the mysteries of supercooled water

02-Mar-2017 - There are few things more central to life on earth than water. It dominates the physical landscape, covering much of the planet as oceans. It's also a major component of the human body, comprising, for example, more than 70% of the mass of a newborn baby. Yet despite its omnipresence, water has ...

Water: Finding the normal within the weird

15-Dec-2016 - Water has many unusual properties, such as its solid form, ice, being able to float in liquid water, and they get weirder below its freezing point. Supercooled water -- below freezing but still a liquid -- is notoriously difficult to study. Some researchers thought supercooled water behaved oddly ...

Inside tiny tubes, water turns solid when it should be boiling

30-Nov-2016 - It's a well-known fact that water, at sea level, starts to boil at a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, or 100 degrees Celsius. And scientists have long observed that when water is confined in very small spaces, its boiling and freezing points can change a bit, usually dropping by around 10 C ...

Closing in on high-temperature superconductivity

20-Sep-2016 - The quest to know the mysterious recipe for high-temperature superconductivity, which could enable revolutionary advances in technologies that make or use electricity, just took a big leap forward thanks to new research by an international team of experimental and theoretical physicists. The ...

Researchers find way of developing composites that self-heal at very low temperatures

14-Sep-2016 - Scientists have developed a method of allowing materials, commonly used in aircraft and satellites, to self-heal cracks at temperatures well below freezing. The paper, published in Royal Society Open Science, is the first to show that self-healing materials can be manipulated to operate at very ...