All that matters

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"All that matters" highlights the latest exciting developments in the physical sciences. The blog is written by Joerg Heber, a Senior Editor at Nature Materials, one of the leading scientific journals in the physical sciences.

All that matters's Latest Posts

X-ray crystallography made easy

Sixty years ago this month Nature published the famous paper by Watson and Crick solving the structure of DNA. At the time many researchers pursued this goal, made difficult by the complexity of the DNA itself. A key contribution to the solution of the puzzle was the x-ray diffraction data provided by Rosalind Franklin. Indeed, without [...]

WATSON, J. & CRICK, F. (1953). Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid, Nature, 171 (4356) 737-738. DOI: 10.1038/171737a0

FRANKLIN, R. & GOSLING, R. (1953). Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate, Nature, 171 (4356) 740-741. DOI: 10.1038/171740a0

Inokuma, Y., Yoshioka, S., Ariyoshi, J., Arai, T., Hitora, Y., Takada, K., Matsunaga, S., Rissanen, K. & Fujita, M. (2013). X-ray analysis on the nanogram to microgram scale using porous complexes, Nature, 495 (7442) 461-466. DOI: 10.1038/nature11990

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The curse of the obsession with doctorate degrees

Today the University of Düsseldorf in Germany has revoked the doctorate of the German Federal Minister of Education and Research, Annette Schavan, following accusations of plagiarism. She denies the accusations and has announced to continue the fight for her degree in court. This is the second case in two years of a German federal minister [...]

Lithium-ion batteries and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is the most recent major new aircraft design from Boeing, and the manufacturer’s most fuel-efficient plane. I have never had the pleasure of being passenger on one of these, but the design is certainly very modern. Composite materials are widely used in the aircraft, which is key to the plane’s fuel [...]

Measuring mass by telling the time

How do you measure mass with high precision? This is not an easy question, as it is very difficult to measure the weight of something with the same ultra-high precision with which atomic clocks measure time. To this day, the kilogram is defined by a piece of metal made of platinum and iridium that is stored in Paris. [...]

Lan, S., Kuan, P., Estey, B., English, D., Brown, J., Hohensee, M. & Muller, H. (2013). A Clock Directly Linking Time to a Particle's Mass, Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1230767

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Atoms at negative absolute temperatures

Usually we tend to think about temperature as being related to the motion of atoms. At lower temperatures, atomic motions slow down. Absolute zero, defined as zero Kelvin or −273.15 degrees Celsius, then is the point where all atomic motion stops. But what comes beyond that, does something like a negative absolute temperature exist? Indeed, as Ulrich Schneider [...]

Braun, S., Ronzheimer, J., Schreiber, M., Hodgman, S., Rom, T., Bloch, I. & Schneider, U. (2013). Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom, Science, 339 (6115) 52-55. DOI: 10.1126/science.1227831

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