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EPJ E - How to build doughnuts with Lego blocks

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Published on 10 August 2012

Controlling forces between oppositely charged polymers opens a new route towards creating vectors for gene therapy

Scientists have uncovered how nature minimises energy costs in rings of liquids with an internal nanostructure made of two chemically discordant polymers joined with strong bonds, or di-blocks, deposited on a silicon surface, in an article published in EPJE.

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EPJ B - New model for epidemic contagion

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Published on 10 August 2012

Improved estimates on the geographical spread of infectious diseases are achieved by studying human mobility networks

Humans are considered the hosts for spreading epidemics. The speed at which an epidemic spreads is now better understood thanks to a new model accounting for the provincial nature of human mobility, according to a study published in EPJB. The research was conducted by a team lead by Vitaly Belik from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, who is also affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Germany.

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EPJ B - Towards high-temperature superconductors

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Published on 10 August 2012

Scientists produce a new type of superconductor by manipulating graphene, the study of which led to a Nobel Prize

Chinese scientists have manipulated the charge and the degree of freedom, known as spin, of electrons and their associated magnetic properties in a single-layer carbon material called graphene, making it suitable for applications involving superconductivity, a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which electrons travel in a material with no electrical resistance. These findings have recently been published in an article in EPJB by Chunxu Bai from Anyang Normal University and colleagues from the Henan Institute of Science and Technology in Xinxiang.

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EPJ A - Vector Correlators in Lattice QCD: Methods and Applications

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Published on 10 August 2012

Vacuum polarisation, the modification of the photon propagator due to virtual electron-positron pairs, is one of the first quantum loop corrections encountered in field theory. In both QED and QCD it causes the running of the appropriate fine structure constant as the physical scale is varied, and also corrects the magnetic moments of electrons and muons from the value 2 predicted by the Dirac equation.

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EPJ D - Largest ever gas mix caught in ultra-freeze trap

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Published on 10 August 2012

Towards a better understanding of subatomic particles using a new cold-atom setup

A team of scientists have made it easier to study atomic or subatomic-scale properties of the building blocks of matter (which also include protons, neutrons and electrons) known as fermions by slowing down the movement of a large quantity of gaseous atoms at ultra-low temperature. This is according to a study recently published in EPJ D as part of a cold quantum matter special issue, by researchers from the Paris-based École Normale Supérieure and the Non-Linear Institute at Nice Sophia-Antipolis University in France.

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EPJ B - Random noise helps make signals clearer

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Published on 10 August 2012

Model shows that signal clarity only improves if specific energy conditions are met

Scientists have shown the energy conditions, under which a weak signal supplied to a physical system emerges as a stronger signal at the output thanks to the presence of random noise (a process known as stochastic resonance), in a paper that has just been published in EPJB.

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EPJ E - The art of stabilising entangled spaghetti-like materials

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Published on 10 August 2012

Controlling forces between oppositely charged polymers opens a new route towards creating vectors for gene therapy

Gene therapy can only be effective if delivered by a stable complex molecule. Now, scientists have determined the conditions that would stabilise complex molecular structures that are subject to inherent attractions and repulsions triggered by electric charges at the surfaces of the molecules, in a study published in EPJE, by Valentina Mengarelli and her colleagues from the Solid State Physics Laboratory at the Paris-Sud University in Orsay, France, in collaboration with Paris 7 and Evry Universities scientists.

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EPJ D - Instant nanodots grow on silicon to form sensing array

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Published on 10 August 2012

New methods for creating 3D nanostructures deposited on an array of regularly spaced indentations on the surface of silicon films opens the door for innovative nanosensors

Scientists have shown that it is now possible to simultaneously create highly reproductive three-dimensional silicon oxide nanodots on micrometric scale silicon films in only a few seconds. Xavier Landreau and his colleagues at the University of Limoges, France, demonstrated in their paper published in EPJ D that they were able to create a square array of such nanodots, using regularly spaced nanoindents on the deposition layer, that could ultimately find applications as biosensors for genomics or bio-diagnostics.

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EPJ B - No extraordinary effects from microwave and mobile phone heating

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Published on 10 August 2012

Study quantifies effects of electric field-induced versus conventional heating

The effect of microwave heating and cell phone radiation on sample material is no different than a temperature increase, according to scientists from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University, in Tempe, as published in a recent issue of EPJ B.