Physical sciences articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    Gold nanoparticles coated with a thin layer of an oxide allow molecules adsorbed on surfaces as diverse as those of platinum, yeast cells or citrus fruits to be characterized routinely in the laboratory.

    • Martin Moskovits

  • Article |

    Quantum mechanics provides an accurate description of a wide variety of physical systems but it is very challenging to prove that it also applies to macroscopic (classical) mechanical systems. This is because it has been impossible to cool a mechanical mode to its quantum ground state, in which all classical noise is eliminated. Recently, various mechanical devices have been cooled to a near-ground state, but this paper demonstrates the milestone result of a piezoelectric resonator with a mechanical mode cooled to its quantum ground state.

    • A. D. O’Connell
    • , M. Hofheinz
    •  & A. N. Cleland

  • Letter |

    An insulator does not conduct electricity, and so cannot in general be used to transmit an electrical signal. But an insulator's electrons possess spin in addition to charge, and so can transmit a signal in the form of a spin wave. Here a hybrid metal–insulator–metal structure is reported, in which an electrical signal in one metal layer is directly converted to a spin wave in the insulating layer; this wave is then transmitted to the second metal layer, where the signal can be directly recovered as an electrical voltage.

    • Y. Kajiwara
    • , K. Harii
    •  & E. Saitoh

  • Letter |

    Although general relativity underlies modern cosmology, its applicability on cosmological length scales has yet to be stringently tested. Now, at a length scale of tens of megaparsecs, the quantity EG, which combines measures of large-scale gravitational lensing, galaxy clustering, and the growth rate of structure, has been measured to be 0.39±0.06, in agreement with the general relativistic prediction of about 0.4.

    • Reinabelle Reyes
    • , Rachel Mandelbaum
    •  & Robert E. Smith

  • Letter |

    When a shape memory polymer is deformed at a temperature defined by a specific phase transition, the deformed shape is fixed upon cooling, but the original shape can be recovered on reheating. Here the perfluorosulphonic acid ionomer Nafion is shown to exhibit at least four different shapes as a result of its broad reversible phase transition.

    • Tao Xie

  • Letter |

    The presence of gaseous chlorine atom precursors within the troposphere was thought only to occur in marine areas but now nitryl chloride has been found at a distance of 1,400 km from the nearest coastline. A model study shows that the amount of nitryl chloride production in the continental USA alone is similar to previous global estimates for marine regions. A significant fraction of tropospheric chlorine atoms may arise directly from anthropogenic pollutants.

    • Joel A. Thornton
    • , James P. Kercher
    •  & Steven S. Brown

  • Letter |

    Measuring the oscillations of a star can allow the various mixing processes in its interior to be disentangled, through the signature they leave on period spacings in the gravity mode spectrum. Here numerous gravity modes in a young star of about seven solar masses are reported: the mean period spacing enables the extent of the convective core to be determined, and the clear periodic deviation from the mean constrains the location of the chemical transition zone — at about 10 per cent of the radius.

    • Pieter Degroote
    • , Conny Aerts
    •  & Eric Michel

  • News & Views |

    Einstein's theory of general relativity has been tested — and confirmed — on scales far beyond those of our Solar System. But the results don't exclude all alternative theories of gravity.

    • J. Anthony Tyson

  • Books & Arts |

    A proposed reinvention for urban motoring based on ultra-small electric vehicles does not address the bigger environmental or social challenges, finds Daniel Sperling.

    • Daniel Sperling

  • News & Views |

    If evolution has had trouble making effective carbohydrate receptors, what hope do humans have of creating synthetic versions? A method for preparing libraries of such receptors boosts the chances of success.

    • Anthony P. Davis

  • News & Views |

    Unexpected chlorine chemistry in the lowest part of the atmosphere can affect the cycling of nitrogen oxides and the production of ozone, and reduce the lifetime of the greenhouse gas methane.

    • Roland von Glasow

  • News Feature |

    Chemists looking to create complex self-assembling nanostructures are turning to DNA. Katharine Sanderson looks at the science beneath the fold.

    • Katharine Sanderson

  • News |

    General relativity fits survey observations but there's still room for its rivals.

    • Zeeya Merali

  • News |

    Samples collected during Apollo missions suggest a wet interior, raising questions about lunar origins.

    • Eric Hand

  • Review Article |

    • T. D. Ladd
    • , F. Jelezko
    •  & J. L. O’Brien

  • Letter |

    Current models indicate that the Milky Way's stellar halo was assembled from many smaller systems, and recent studies claimed that the true Galactic building blocks must have been vastly different from the surviving dwarfs. But the overall abundance pattern of elements in S1020549, the most iron-poor star in the Sculptor dwarf galaxies, is now found to follow that seen in low-metallicity halo stars, indicating that the systems destroyed to form the halo billions of years ago were not fundamentally different from the progenitors of present-day dwarfs.

    • Anna Frebel
    • , Evan N. Kirby
    •  & Joshua D. Simon

  • Letter |

    To integrate microchips with optical communications a photodetector is required to mediate the optical and electronic signals. Although germanium photodetectors are compatible with silicon their performance is impaired by poor intrinsic noise. Here the noise is reduced by nanometre engineering of optical and electrical fields to produce a compact and efficient photodetector.

    • Solomon Assefa
    • , Fengnian Xia
    •  & Yurii A. Vlasov

  • Letter |

    The phenomenon of superconductivity continues to intrigue, and several new superconducting materials have been discovered in recent years — but in the case of organic superconductors, no new material system with a high superconducting transition temperature has been identified in the past decade. Now it has been shown that the introduction of potassium into crystals of organic molecule picene can yield superconductivity at temperatures as high as 18 K.

    • Ryoji Mitsuhashi
    • , Yuta Suzuki
    •  & Yoshihiro Kubozono

  • Letter |

    The addition of shear orthogonal to the tension-loading plane of crack propagation generates an instability that results in three-dimensional helical crack propagation, atomically rough surfaces and a fracture pattern resembling a series of lance shapes. Here numerical simulations reveal a new law that governs crack propagation in space for materials subject to general stress conditions.

    • Antonio J. Pons
    •  & Alain Karma

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