The simple picture of star formation calls for giant clouds of gas and dust to collapse inward due to gravity, growing denser and hotter until igniting nuclear fusion. In reality, forces other than gravity also influence the birth of stars. New research shows that cosmic magnetic fields play a more important role in star formation than previously thought.

Researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated for the first time the existence of a key magnetic—as opposed to electronic—property of specially built semiconductor devices.

JOSH VILLA was 26 and driving home after a drink with a friend on 28 August 2005 when his car mounted the kerb and flipped over. Villa was thrown through the windscreen, suffered massive head injuries and fell into a coma.

Three of our nano-physicists have made a discovery that can change the way we store data on our computers. This means that in the future we can store data much faster, and more accurate. Their discovery has been published in the scientific journal Nature Physics.

3-D images are not only useful in medicine; the observation of internal structures is also invaluable in many other fields of scientific investigation.

Computers, long used as tools to design and manipulate three-dimensional objects, may soon provide people with a way to sense the texture of those objects or feel how they fit together, thanks to a haptic, or touch-based, interface developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

IT’S an ambitious task, recreating the universe in a bucket. But if it is successful, the experiment could help solve the twin puzzles of why we’re made of matter rather than antimatter and where the huge magnetic fields that span galaxies come from.

Anorthosites, igneous rocks rich in plagioclase feldspar, are common on the Earth, Moon, and possibly other planets. Though anorthosites are usually not considered to be strongly magnetic, Brown and McEnroe note that their magnetic properties could be useful in investigating mineral deposits in addition to magnetic anomalies on other planets, particularly Mars.

Materials researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), together with colleagues from IBM and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have pushed the measurement of thin films to the edge—literally—to produce the first data on how the edges of metallic thin films contribute to their magnetic properties.

A year after launch, scientists working with Hinode, a Japanese mission with ESA participation, are meeting at Trinity College, Dublin, to discuss latest findings on solar mysteries - including new insights on solar flares and coronal heating.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) have done the first theoretical determination of the dominant damping mechanism that settles down excited magnetic states—“ringing” in physics parlance—in some key metals.

Materials that change temperature in magnetic fields could lead to new refrigeration technologies that reduce the use of greenhouse gases, thanks to new research at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and Ames National Laboratory.