May 18, 2010
After billions of years of twinkling and shining, some stars in the heavens appear to “dance” as they wind down. Maybe not like Elvis or Michael Jackson, but they definitely have a rhythmic beat, and some may even spin like a top.
For the next two weeks, the Whole Earth Telescope, [...]
May 21, 2010
Researchers at Spain’s Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) demonstrate evidence in support of the common ancestry of life, thanks to a new computational approach to study protein evolution.
The work, published in Nature, takes its inspiration from the astronomer Edwin Hubble and uses his approach to study protein evolution. The [...]
Physicists at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have developed a quantum interface which connects light particles and atoms. The interface is based on an ultra-thin glass fiber and is suitable for the transmission of quantum information. This is an essential prerequisite for quantum communication which shall be used for secure data [...]
October 7, 2009
Electron microscopes are the most powerful type of microscope, capable of distinguishing even individual atoms. However, these microscopes cannot be used to image living cells because the electrons destroy the samples.
Now, MIT assistant professor Mehmet Fatih Yanik and his student, William Putnam, propose a new scheme that can overcome this limitation by using [...]
October 7, 2009
It’s often the little things that count in industrial manufacturing processes. Particles less than half the diameter of a hair in size can significantly impair quality in production. For example, there should be no particles larger than five micrometers on the packaging film of food and medicines, as these could contaminate the contents.
Tiny [...]
October 7, 2009
IMEC, one of the leading European research centers in photovoltaics, and BP Solar, a leading energy company, demonstrated a 18% conversion efficiency for silicon solar cells made of BP Solar’s newly developed Mono2TM silicon. By combining IMEC’s advanced processing techniques with BP Solar’s high-quality low-cost substrates, the companies demonstrated that Mono2 has a [...]
October 7, 2009
Researchers have created a CMOS (semiconductor) camera capable of filming individual photons one million times a second.
The scientists wanted to create the fastest, highest resolution CMOS (semiconductor) video camera, but to do that they needed to choose an ultra-fast photo detector. They also needed to choose between two competing timing mechanisms or stopwatches, [...]
October 6, 2009
High-energy heavy ion collisions, which are studied at RHIC in Brookhaven and soon at the LHC in Geneva, can be a source of light flashes of a few yoctoseconds duration (a septillionth of a second, 10-24 s, or ys for short) — the time that light needs to traverse an atomic nucleus. This [...]
October 6, 2009
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half to Charles K. Kao, Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication”, and the other half jointly [...]
October 6, 2009
IMEC has demonstrated a fully solution-processed organic solar cell with a spray-coated active layer and a metal top contact spray-coated on top. The resulting cell shows power conversion efficiencies above 3%, a performance comparable to organic solar cells produced by spin coating of the organic layer and vacuum evaporation of the top contact [...]
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