For more than a century, schoolbook physics has divided matter into neat categories like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. A wave of recent experiments is now tearing at those boundaries, revealing ...

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The melting of materials seems like a simple phenomenon. However, when their thickness is reduced to just a few atoms, ...

A team of researchers from Switzerland and France and theoretical physicists in Canada and the U.S., including Rice University, believe they have found evidence of a theorized quantum phenomenon ...

"Robot" made of shape-shifting matter liquefies to escape jail By Michael Irving January 30, 2023 A humanoid "robot" made of a phase-change material shifts from solid and liquid to escape jail, in ...

The manipulation of metals as they transform from a liquid to a solid can have immense benefits for technologies. A new study finds that the manipulation of stationary atoms in a liquid metal can ...

A quirky material that behaves like a mishmash of liquid and solid could be hidden deep in the Earth. Computer simulations described in two studies suggest that the material in Earth’s inner core, ...

The state of matter is a deceptively simple concept. It turns out that any material, no matter what it is made of, can exist in one of three forms: solid, liquid or gas. These are categories of stuff ...

Discover how everyday bathroom products like toothpaste and shampoo illustrate the fascinating physics of soft matter and its ...