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Finding power laws has now become de rigueur when analyzing popularity distributions. Long tails have been reported for the frequency of word usage in many languages [2], the number of citations of scientific papers [3], the number of visits (hits) to individual websites in a given time interval [4], and many more.

Turtles, birds, and butterflies can migrate thousands of kilometers--even over vast oceans largely free of landmarks. Scientists suspect that these animals find their way by sensing Earth's magnetic field, yet the exact nature of this internal compass has remained a mystery. Now, researchers believe they have come closer to solving the puzzle: a magnetic-sensing chemical reaction within the eye.

Make holes in a film of gold so thin that it's already semitransparent, and less light gets through.

Nearly 40% of the food supply in the United States goes to waste, according to a new study, and the problem has been getting worse.

Incorporating both the magnetic leads and the underlying semiconductor, a spintronics circuit could hold its memory when turned off, as the magnetic elements remain magnetized. Manipulating spin could also require far less power than steering charges does, says Ron Jansen of the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands. Some physicists even aspire to create a spooky quantum connection called "entanglement" between spin-polarized currents to make a quantum computer that could crack problems that stymie an ordinary one.

In a Rapid Communication appearing in Physical Review A, Pengfei Zhang and colleagues at Shanxi University, China, describe experiments where they tracked an atom’s path with a spatial resolution of 100 nanometers and in a measurement time of 10 microseconds.

A new experiment reported in Physical Review Letters shows that—contrary to popular wisdom—paddling can be as effective in air as it is in water. This could imply that insects evolved their flight capability from some earlier swimming trait.

Using high-speed video cameras to track wing motion, the team observed certain cases where the flies paddled their wings forward and backward. To confirm that this was indeed drag-based motion, the team plugged their wing data into an “insect flight simulator” and found that they could reproduce the fly’s overall movement. The authors constructed a simple model of paddling, which seems to support the theory that insect wings evolved in water.

The design mimics the way light scatters from embedded air pockets found in certain bird feathers.

Japanese scientists have built a cellular automaton from individual molecules that carries out huge numbers of calculations in parallel

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1110.5844: Massively Parallel Computing An An Organic Molecular Layer