Fry’s Electronics Going Out of Business, Shutting Down All Stores

UnknowingFool and scores of other readers have shared this report: Fry’s Electronics, the decades-old superstore chain with locations in nine American states, appears to have gone defunct. Bay Area TV station KRON-4 was the first press outlet to confirm the news late Tuesday, saying that Fry’s will shut down all 30 of its American locations. The retailer will reportedly make an…

Investigating the wave properties of matter with vibrating molecules

The working group led by Prof. Stephan Schiller, Ph.D. from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has used a novel, high-precision laser spectroscopic experiment to measure the internal vibration of the simplest molecule. This allowed the researchers to investigate the wave character of the motion of atomic nuclei with unprecedented accuracy. They present their findings in the current edition of Nature Physics….

The Milky Way does the wave

In results announced this week at the 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky survey present the most detailed look yet at the warp of our own galaxy. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-milky.html…

AI Solves Schrodinger’s Equation

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of scientists at Freie Universitat Berlin has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) method for calculating the ground state of the Schrodinger equation in quantum chemistry. The goal of quantum chemistry is to predict chemical and physical properties of molecules based solely on the arrangement of their atoms in space, avoiding the…

Are Fragments of Energy the Fundamental Building Blocks of the Universe?

hcs_$reboot shares a remarkable new theory from Larry M. Silverberg, an aerospace engineering professor at North Carolina State University (with colleague Jeffrey Eischen). They’re proposing that matter is not made of particles (or even waves), as was long thought, but fragments of energy. [W]hile the theories and math of waves and particles allow scientists to make incredibly accurate predictions about the…

Is Digital Banking the Wave of the Future?

CNN looks at a unique new digital bank named Greenwood — and its implications for the future of banking:
Greenwood was created by Bounce TV founder Ryan Glover and his close friend, rapper-activist Michael “Killer Mike” Render. The leadership team at Greenwood, which includes former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, unveiled their new platform on Thursday after raising more than $3 million in…

New approach to exotic quantum matter

In a three-dimensional world, all particles must be either fermions or bosons, but in fewer dimensions, the existence of particles known as anyons, which have intermediate quantum statistics, is possible. Such fascinating objects are strongly believed to exist as emerging quasiparticles in fractional quantum Hall systems, but despite great efforts, experimental evidence of anyons has remained very limited. Since quantum statistics…

Shock-Dissipating Fractal Cubes Could Forge High-Tech Armor

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Tiny, 3-D printed cubes of plastic, with intricate fractal voids built into them, have proven to be effective at dissipating shockwaves, potentially leading to new types of lightweight armor and structural materials effective against explosions and impacts. “The goal of the work is to manipulate the wave interactions resulting from a shockwave,” said…

Why fireflies light up

A firefly’s familiar glow is caused by a chemical reaction. Explanation here, plus many wonderful firefly photos. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/bugs-firefly-light…

Finite-temperature violation of the anomalous transverse Wiedemann-Franz law

According to the Wiedemann-Franz (WF) law, the electrical conductivity of a metal is linked to its thermal counterpart, provided that the heat carried by the phonons is negligible and the electrons do not suffer inelastic scattering. In a type II Weyl semimetal also known as a fourth fermion, the thermal dependence of the ratio between electrical and thermal conductivity highlights deviations…