James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Chalmers researchers have developed a simple, light-based platform to study the mysterious “invisible glue” that binds materials at the nanoscale. Gold flakes floating in salt water reveal how quantum ...

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.

Researchers have discovered that ferroelectric fluids can harness an overlooked transverse electrostatic force (TEF) to rise over 80 mm, without magnets or high voltages. By exploiting the fluid's ...

Ask most robots to pick up an egg and you end up with… a broken egg. But this pair of automated fingers uses an incredibly delicate thin film and some simple physics to grasp fragile objects with ...

An international research team led by the University of Vienna has succeeded in developing a new method to directly measure partial charges in molecules. The results, now published in Nature, provide ...

"...a personal field ... as portrayed in many science fiction movies and comic books, that is invisible to the naked eye—that will take some doing." Reading time 5 ...

Discovering a machine that could somehow produce thrust without releasing propellant would be a game-changer for human space travel. There’s just one problem—such a device would defy the laws of ...