A team of Rice engineers has developed a system that could transform desalination practices, making the process more adaptable, resilient and cheaper. The new system is powered by sunlight and uses a creative approach to heat recovery for extended water production ⎯ with and without sunshine.

Mississippi State Professor of Physics Dipangkar Dutta is a principal investigator on a groundbreaking experiment—revealing “symmetry” in physics doesn’t always behave as scientists once believed—recently published in the prestigious journal Physics Letters B.

A new study shows that an unassuming plant has some very unusual family dynamics.

MIT engineers built E-BAR, a mobile robot designed to physically support the elderly and prevent them from falling as they move around their homes. E-BAR acts as a set of robotic handlebars that follows a person from behind, allowing them to walk independently or lean on the robot’s arms for support. 

From the ocean’s rolling swells to the bumpy ride of a jetliner, turbulence is everywhere. Yet despite its ubiquity, turbulence remains one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics. It's especially complicated to understand how it behaves in space. By developing the world’s largest-ever simulations of magnetized turbulence, an international team of scientists has measured — with unprecedented precision — how turbulent energy moves across a vast range of scales. The result: it doesn’t match with long-standing theories. By simulating galactic-type turbulence in exquisite detail, the researchers found significant departures from the models that have guided astrophysical theory for decades. The findings could reshape how scientists understand the structure of the Galaxy, the transport of high-energy particles, and even the turbulent birth of stars. In practical terms, understanding and properly modeling turbulence and the transport of highly energetic particles can shed light on how to safely navigate space, at a time when commercial space flight is growing and attracting the interest of civilians and celebrities alike.

Flamingos have developed an amazing variety of techniques to create swirls and eddies in the water to concentrate and eat brine shrimp and other organisms, a UC Berkeley biologist found. They stomp dance to stir organisms from the bottom and concentrate them in whorls. The organisms are then drawn upward by a head jerk that forms a vortex. Meanwhile, their beak is chattering underwater to create vortices that funnel prey into their mouths.

A new study led by the University of Southampton and research institutes in France has uncovered the mystery of how mini sand dunes form on beaches and in deserts.

In an advance that could lead to better treatment of troublesome fungal infections, Brown University engineers have developed a nanoscale drug delivery system specially targeted to fungal cells.