Physical sciences articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    You might think that the partial symmetry of the molecule complanadine A makes it easy to prepare, but the reverse is true. Two syntheses of this compound offer insight into how to make partly symmetrical molecules.

    • Scott A. Snyder

  • News |

    Realistic computational models of supernovae might soon solve a long-standing mystery.

    • Eric Hand

  • News & Views |

    Quantum simulation is a promising tool for navigating the complex world of many-body physics. The technique has now been employed to simulate a frustrated network of three quantum magnets by using trapped ions.

    • Hartmut Häffner

  • News & Views |

    A fine marriage between galaxy data and theoretical simulations offers an explanation for two apparently conflicting sets of observations on the rate at which stars formed at early cosmic times.

    • Robert C. Kennicutt Jr

  • News & Views |

    The appearance of an unexplained electronic state in the uranium metal URu2Si2 at low temperatures has long puzzled condensed-matter physicists. The latest experiment on the material sheds light on the process.

    • Andrew J. Schofield

  • Letter |

    Stop codons in messenger RNA define when a protein sequence has been completely synthesized; such codons bind release factors (RFs), which cause the newly made protein to be released. Structures of RFs alone and in combination with the ribosome have been reported, but the energetics of the reaction in the presence of codons had not been determined. Here, molecular dynamics simulations of 14 termination complexes are used to define how termination is achieved and how the RFs distinguish different sequences.

    • Johan Sund
    • , Martin Andér
    •  & Johan Åqvist

  • Letter |

    Atomic nuclei have a shell structure that allows for 'magic numbers' of neutrons and protons, analogous to the noble gases in atomic physics. Knowledge of the properties of single-particle states outside nuclear shell closures in exotic nuclei is important for the fundamental understanding of nuclear structure and nucleosynthesis. Here, a nucleon-transfer technique has been used to measure the single-particle states of 133Sn, revealing the highly magic nature of 132Sn.

    • K. L. Jones
    • , A. S. Adekola
    •  & J. S. Thomas

  • Letter |

    A pinwheel array of deep troughs has been one of the most perplexing features of the north polar layered deposits on Mars. Many ideas have been put forward about how it formed, but there is as yet no consensus. Here, penetrating radar has been used to rule out erosional cutting as a mechanism for the formation of the array. Instead, it is concluded that the troughs are largely depositional in origin, and have migrated to the poles and upwards in elevation over the past two million years or so.

    • Isaac B. Smith
    •  & John W. Holt

  • Letter |

    The Chasma Boreale is a large canyon — 500 km long, up to 100 km wide, and nearly 2 km deep — that cuts into the north polar layered deposits on Mars. Quite how it formed has been unclear. However, new penetrating radar imagery has now been used to show that depositional processes, rather than catastrophic events, were responsible.

    • J. W. Holt
    • , K. E. Fishbaugh
    •  & R. J. Phillips

  • Letter |

    The magnetism produced by electrons in a solid can have two components — the spin and orbital moments — that are interchangeable on femtosecond timescales. Here it is shown how rapid changes in these two components can be disentangled, providing insights into the underlying dynamical processes that could be of value for the ultrafast control of information in magnetic recording media.

    • C. Boeglin
    • , E. Beaurepaire
    •  & J.-Y. Bigot

  • Books & Arts |

    Brian Greene, author of best-selling books The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, is a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, New York. As an orchestral work based on his 2008 children's book, Icarus at the Edge of Time, premieres next week, Greene discusses black holes and how music might portray the physics of warped space-time.

    • Jascha Hoffman

  • News & Views |

    By swapping the roles of the target and beam in an experiment that is otherwise impossible to implement, researchers have confirmed the doubly magic nature of the neutron-rich radioactive tin isotope 132Sn.

    • Paul Cottle

  • News & Views |

    The membrane-spanning enzyme known as complex I couples the movement of electrons to that of protons as a way of converting energy. Crystal structures suggest how electron transfer drives proton pumping from afar.

    • Tomoko Ohnishi

  • Books & Arts |

    A book promoting the use of informatics to help us live greener lives could have been enhanced by following interactive design principles, suggests Nick Salafsky.

    • Nick Salafsky

  • Careers Q&A |

    Rafael Jaramillo received the 2010 Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award on 4 May from the Advanced Photon Source Users Organization for his work on the fundamentals of magnetism at low temperatures.

    • Virginia Gewin

  • Letter |

    The unusual supernova SN 2005E is distinguished from any supernovae hitherto observed by several features, which are claimed to be explained by a helium detonation in a thin surface layer of an accreting white dwarf. The observed properties of SN 2005cz are now shown to resemble those of SN 2005E. It is argued that these properties are best explained by a core-collapse supernova at the low-mass end of the range of massive stars that explode.

    • K. S. Kawabata
    • , K. Maeda
    •  & K. Itagaki

  • Letter |

    Supernovae are thought to arise through one of two processes. Type Ib/c and type II supernovae are produced when the cores of massive, short-lived stars undergo gravitational core collapse and eject a few solar masses. Type Ia supernovae are thought to form by the thermonuclear detonation of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf. Here a faint type Ib supernova, SN 2005E, is reported that seems not to have had a core-collapse origin, but perhaps arose from a low-mass, old progenitor, probably a helium-accreting white dwarf in a binary.

    • H. B. Perets
    • , A. Gal-Yam
    •  & D. Poznanski

  • Letter |

    Although compound semiconductors like gallium arsenide (GaAs) offer advantages over silicon for photovoltaic and optoelectronic applications, these do not outweigh the costly process of growing large layers of these materials and transferring them to appropriate substrates. However, a new fabrication approach is now demonstrated: films of GaAs and AlGaAs are grown in thick, multilayered assemblies in a single sequence; the individual layers are then released and distributed over foreign substrates by printing.

    • Jongseung Yoon
    • , Sungjin Jo
    •  & John A. Rogers

  • News & Views |

    Examples of stellar explosions have emerged that fall outside the traditional types of supernova. The nature of the stars that produce them and the mechanism by which they explode is far from clear.

    • David Branch

  • Careers Q&A |

    Chang-Hwan Choi, a nanoengineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, received a 2010 Young Investigator Program award from the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) for his design of anti-corrosion surfaces that will make Navy vessels more durable.

    • Virginia Gewin

  • News & Views |

    Spiders' webs are coated with microscopic droplets of glue, but the properties of this adhesive were unclear. It has now been found that the glue's stretchiness underpins its role in catching flies.

    • Haeshin Lee

  • News & Views |

    The finding that some gas-giant exoplanets are much larger than theory predicts has been boggling astronomers' minds. Planetary heating caused by gravitational tidal interactions might be a piece of the puzzle.

    • Pin-Gao Gu

  • Letter |

    Superconductivity and magnetic order are well known in C60 compounds of the form A3C60 (where A = alkali metal). The spherical C60 molecular ions in these crystals are almost always arranged in a face-centred cubic (f.c.c.) packing, except in Cs3C60, where the known superconducting phase has a body-centred cubic (b.c.c) packing. Now the f.c.c. polymorph for Cs3C60 has been isolated; it too is superconducting, although its magnetic properties are very different to those of its b.c.c counterpart.

    • Alexey Y. Ganin
    • , Yasuhiro Takabayashi
    •  & Kosmas Prassides

  • News |

    Nature reports from the research ship Pelican as scientists map the hidden extent of the Deepwater disaster.

    • Mark Schrope

  • Letter |

    Interactions between microscopic particles are usually described as two-body interactions, although it has been shown that higher-order multi-body interactions could give rise to new quantum phases with intriguing properties. Here, effective six-body interactions are demonstrated in a system of ultracold bosonic atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice.

    • Sebastian Will
    • , Thorsten Best
    •  & Immanuel Bloch

  • Letter |

    NGC 6791 is a well studied open cluster that is so close to us that it can be imaged down to very faint luminosities. Two different ages have been proposed for this cluster, one based on the white dwarf luminosity function and one derived from its main-sequence stars. The discrepancy in age is now resolved by the finding that, as theoretically anticipated, physical separation processes occur in the core of white dwarfs.

    • Enrique García-Berro
    • , Santiago Torres
    •  & Jordi Isern

  • Letter |

    Many new functional materials and devices could be made if it were possible to rationally combine nanometre-scale particles into larger structures. An assembly line operating on the nanometre scale has now been demonstrated. It uses a DNA origami tile as a framework and track for the assembly process, three distinct DNA machines attached to the tile as programmable cargo-donating devices, and a DNA walker to generate the target product by moving along the track and collecting cargo from those devices that are switched on.

    • Hongzhou Gu
    • , Jie Chao
    •  & Nadrian C. Seeman

  • Letter |

    Spider silk proteins are remarkably soluble when stored at high concentration and yet can be converted to extremely sturdy fibres, through unknown molecular mechanisms. Here, the X-ray structure of the amino-terminal domain of a silk protein is presented, revealing how evolutionarily conserved polar surfaces might control self-assembly as the pH is lowered along the spider's silk extrusion duct. Such a mechanism might be applicable to the design of versatile fibrous materials.

    • Glareh Askarieh
    • , My Hedhammar
    •  & Stefan D. Knight

  • News & Views |

    For many potential applications, carbon nanotubes must be chemically modified, but the reactions involved aren't easily controlled. The discovery of a reversible modification process is a step towards such control.

    • Maurizio Prato

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