Ions

If, like me, you can't go a day without making sure your watch is synced to the second, you'll be delighted to learn that a new atomic clock has broken the record with an accuracy of 5.5 x 10⁻¹⁹ – gaining or losing one second in 57.6 billion years.

NASA scientists have discovered a third global energy field around Earth. Known as the ambipolar electric field, this force drives charged particles into space above the poles and joins the known gravity and electromagnetic fields.

Scientists have discovered the potential existence of a bizarre new molecule related to water. Dubbed “aquodiium,” this ion could form under extreme conditions and may explain some of the weirdness of our solar system’s ice giant planets.

The Moon may look like a big dry ball, but there’s more water up there than you might expect. In a new study, scientists have shown that at least some of it could have been showered onto the lunar surface from the Earth’s atmosphere.

Transmitting data from medical implants in the body can be tricky, but a new technique can essentially write data to ions in human tissue, where it can then be read from a receiver outside the body at high transmission speeds.

Artificial devices usually don’t communicate well with nature. Now, researchers have created artificial organic neurons and synapses that can integrate with natural biological systems, and demonstrated this by making a Venus flytrap close on demand.

Water can take on far more forms than many people give it credit for, and now scientists have recreated a particularly bizarre one in the lab – a “hot black ice” that may exist deep inside planets like Uranus and Neptune.

Antimatter is hard to study, not least because it annihilates any container you try to put it in. Now CERN physicists have developed a new antimatter trap that can cool samples in seconds, which could help unlock a fundamental mystery of the universe.

When you think of processes that could benefit from a high-tech makeover, the drying of fruit may not be the first that comes to mind. It turns out, however, that the use of "ionic wind" for fruit-dehydration saves energy and preserves nutrients.

A team of engineers from Caltech have created a stable ring of plasma in open air, using just a high-pressure jet of water and a crystal plate. The technique could, in the long run, unlock the potential for plasma to be used for storing energy.

Eighty-five percent of all matter is dark matter, a theoretical substance that doesn’t interact with ordinary matter and has so far eluded our best efforts to directly detect it. Now physicists have proposed a new way to find dark matter using a huge tub of helium in a superfluid state.

On the road to getting humans to Mars, engineers from NASA and the University of Michigan have successfully tested the X3, a thruster designed to get us to Mars. And it’s broken several records in the process.