Scientists have isolated the two different forms of water molecule for the first time.

Water molecules were known to exist as two distinct "isomers", or types, based on their slightly different properties at the atomic level.

By separating out the two isomers, researchers were able to show that they behave differently in the way that they undergo chemical reactions.

The work appears in Nature Communications.

In basic terms, water molecules consist of a single oxygen atom bonded to a pair of hydrogen atoms (HO).

However, they can be further subdivided based on a property of the nuclei at the hearts of the hydrogen atoms - their "spin".

While they aren't spinning in the sense we would understand, this property of hydrogen nuclei does affect the rotation of the water molecules themselves.

If the nuclear spins of the two hydrogen atoms in water are oriented in the same direction, it is called ortho-water. If they are arranged in different directions, it is known as para-water.

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Scientists expand the range of conditions thought to be suitable for habitability of exoplanets. A new study provides new clues indicating that an exoplanet 500 light-years away is much like Earth. Kepler-186f is the first identified Earth-sized planet outside the Solar System orbiting a star in the habitable zone. This means it's the proper distance from its host star for liquid water to pool on the surface.

The conventional way of approaching the defining categories of what can be termed a habitable planet is to compare how similar the planet is to Earth. This means that planets must occupy an orbital location around their central star where liquid water can exist—the so-called circumstellar habitable zone—they must be terrestrial bodies, not too big and not too small. However, this conservative perspective defining what can be considered a habitable planet is based on the presumption that life elsewhere in the galaxy must be like life on Earth—it also...

"DNA charge transport," a process used in DNA repair, is disrupted by a colon cancer mutation

One of the biggest helpers in our bodies' ongoing efforts to prevent DNA mutations—mutations that can lead to cancer—is actually rather tiny. Electrons, as it turns out, can signal certain proteins to patch up DNA damage. More specifically, the movement of electrons through DNA, traveling between repair proteins bound to the double helix, helps our cells scan for mistakes that regularly arise in our DNA.

Known as DNA charge transport, this biochemical process was first discovered in the early 1990s by Caltech's Jacqueline Barton, the John G. Kirkwood and Arthur A. Noyes Professor of Chemistry, through chemistry experiments using synthetic DNA. Her research group then found evidence that this charge transport chemistry might be utilized by DNA repair proteins in bacteria. Now, a new study shows that DNA charge transport is also at work in human versions of DNA repair...

Article by Resonance Science Foundation

Experiments by Sam Dillavou and Shmuel Rubinstein at Harvard University have, for the first time, revealed that the friction between two surfaces has a “memory”. This means that the force can depend not only on the present state of the interface but also on how the interface has reached its current state.

This new insight could have a bearing on how physicists characterize friction in materials such as rock, metals and paper and apply to a wide range of physical systems from micromachines to earthquakes.

Contact area

The amount of friction generated by two surfaces is directly related to their contact area. Microscopic irregularities in the surfaces are gradually flattened as time progresses, increasing the contact area and therefore increasing friction.

Under these conditions, the contact area, and thus friction, increases logarithmically with time in a process known as ageing. “The observed behaviour is...

Article by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Astrophysicist, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientist

The latest supernovae survey reveals the crucial importance in furthering our understanding of supernovae and reaching confident conclusions as soon as possible.

The standard theory of stellar evolution results in an explosion and is revealed in a rare and beautiful astronomical event. Astronomers search for these events in the hope that they will provide greater insight into our understanding of stellar evolution. Although each supernovae event is different, specific stars will yield certain characteristics. One type of Supernovae event that is of particular interest is the type associated with a binary star system in which one of the components is a white dwarf – this is known as a Type 1a supernova. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars that have exhausted all their hydrogen and their extreme density is thus a result of them not being able to support the inward pull of gravity...

by Resonance Science Foundation

The scientific collaborations LIGO and Virgo have detected gravitational waves from the fusion of two black holes, inaugurating a new era in the study of the cosmos. But what if those ripples of space-time were not produced by black holes, but by other exotic objects? A team of European physicists suggest an alternative—wormholes that can be traversed to appear in another universe.

Scientists have deduced the existence of black holes from a multitude of experiments, theoretical models and indirect observations such as the recent LIGO detections, which are believed to originate from the collision of two of these dark gravitational monsters.

But there is a problem with black holes—they present an edge, called an event horizon, from which nothing can escape. This is in conflict with quantum mechanics, whose postulates ensure that information is always preserved, not lost.

One of the theoretical ways to deal with this conflict...

Image by NASA's Cassini spacecraft

The rotation speed – spin rate – of Saturn was previously found through observations of its magnetic field. Now, scientists have determined the spin rate through ripples in its rings!

NASA's twin voyager probes, launched over 40 years ago, observed the swirling magnetic field of Saturn, from which it was able to deduce a rotation period for the magnetic field and conclude a spin rate of 10 hours and 40 minutes. During this mission, in the 1980’s, the ring system was observed in great detail revealing the gravitational effects of Saturn’s moons on the rock and ice particles in the rings. When the particles and moons orbit at simple ratios of each other, the particles are periodically kicked by the moons. These kicks, known as orbital resonance, can launch waves that propagate away from the planet – with some anomalous “backwards” waves.

Detailed observations of these waves have been made, since 2000,...

The "Back to the Future" time machine runs on an imaginary flux capacitor but could the movie invention become reality?

In the popular movie franchise Back to the Future, an eccentric scientist creates a time machine that runs on a flux capacitor.

Now a group of actual physicists from Australia (RMIT University, University of Queensland) and Switzerland (ETH Zurich) have proposed a similar device that can break time-reversal symmetry.

While their flux capacitor doesn’t enable time travel, it’s a critical step in future technologies like the quantum computer and could lead to better electronics for mobile phones and wifi.

The research, published in Physical Review Letters, proposes a new generation of electronic circulators - devices that control the direction in which microwave signals move.

RMIT’s Professor Jared Cole said the device proposed in the research was built from a superconductor, in which electricity can flow without electrical...

Article by William Brown and Dr. Amira Val Baker, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientists

Supermassive black holes observed for the first time at the earliest epoch of star and galaxy formation are indicating that black holes form first and guide the later accretion and structuring of stars and galaxies

For decades physicist Nassim Haramein has been expounding a controversial idea in astrophysics—that structures from elementary particles to galaxies and the universe itself are the result of infinitely curved spacetime geometries, popularly known as black holes. In essence, this means that all the stuff we think of as material, physical objects in fact only appear substantive because of the geometry and torque of spacetime in these regions. As Charles Misner and John Wheeler stated it:

There is nothing in the world except empty curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism, and other fields are only manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is...

Article by Emily Conover

The largest particle detector of its kind has failed to turn up any hints of dark matter, despite searching for about a year.

Known as XENON1T, the experiment is designed to detect elusive dark matter particles, which are thought to make up most of the matter in the cosmos. Physicists don’t know what dark matter is. One of the most popular explanations is a particle called a WIMP, short for weakly interacting massive particle. XENON1T searches for WIMPs crashing into atomic nuclei in 1,300 kilograms of chilled liquid xenon. But XENON1T saw no such collisions. The particles’ absence further winnowed down their possible hiding places by placing new limits on how frequently WIMPs can interact with nuclei depending on their mass.

Researchers describe the results May 28 in two talks, one at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, where XENON1T is located, and the other at the European particle physics lab CERN in Geneva. XENON1T...