Nature: The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced that it was providing £50 million ($78 million) to open a National Graphene Institute at the University of Manchester in 2015. The goal of the institute will be to convert basic research into industrial applications for grapheneâmdash;a thin, flexible honeycomb-like layer of carbon. Because of graphene’s unique properties, it could potentially be used in a wide range of electronic devices. The University of Manchester’s Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 2004 discovery of a simple way to create graphene sheets, which sparked a worldwide explosion of interest among physicists and chemists.
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
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