{"id":242887,"date":"2026-08-19T05:21:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:21:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/scientists-see-nanoscale-forces-providing-evidence-of-electric-fields-at-the-air-water-interface"},"modified":"2026-08-19T05:21:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:21:28","slug":"scientists-see-nanoscale-forces-providing-evidence-of-electric-fields-at-the-air-water-interface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/scientists-see-nanoscale-forces-providing-evidence-of-electric-fields-at-the-air-water-interface","title":{"rendered":"Scientists \u2018see\u2019 nanoscale forces, providing evidence of electric fields at the air\u2011water interface"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-see-nanoscale-forces-providing-evidence-of-electric-fields-at-the-air-water-interface.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Bubbles are round, and we know surface tension does that. But squeeze that gas-liquid boundary into a space only a few tens of nanometers wide\u2014could other forces be at work?<\/p>\n<p>Now, an international team from Kyushu University, Nankai University, Stanford University and the University of Alberta has taken a direct look. Publishing on July 14 in the <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1021\/jacs.6c08580\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Journal of the American Chemical Society<\/i><\/a>, they combined three-dimensional transmission electron microscopy (3D TEM) with force analysis to provide evidence for a powerful electric field at nanoconfined air-water interfaces.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWater looks simple, but it\u2019s actually incredibly complex,\u201d says Qin-Yi Li, associate professor at Kyushu University\u2019s Faculty of Engineering. \u201cIts structure is especially rich at the water-air interface, and it shifts dramatically with scale.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bubbles are round, and we know surface tension does that. But squeeze that gas-liquid boundary into a space only a few tens of nanometers wide\u2014could other forces be at work? Now, an international team from Kyushu University, Nankai University, Stanford University and the University of Alberta has taken a direct look. Publishing on July 14 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,38,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-engineering","category-nanotechnology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}