MC²

July 31, 2009
A team of physicists from the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham have shown that electrons in narrow wires can divide into two new particles called spinons and a holons.
The electron is a fundamental building block of nature and is indivisible in isolation, yet a new experiment has shown that electrons, if crowded into [...]

July 31, 2009
When the legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov penned the “Three Laws of Responsible Robotics,” he forever changed the way humans think about artificial intelligence, and inspired generations of engineers to take up robotics.
In the current issue of journal IEEE Intelligent Systems, two engineers propose alternative laws to rewrite our future with [...]

July 29, 2009
Recent research into the properties of graphene nanoribbons provides two new reasons for using the material as interconnects in future computer chips. In widths as narrow as 16 nanometers, graphene has a current carrying capacity approximately a thousand times greater than copper – while providing improved thermal conductivity.
The current-carrying and heat-transfer measurements were [...]

July 29, 2009
Powerful new radio technologies that promise blisteringly fast WiFi have been given a boost by a team of European researchers’ cutting-edge work on miniscule microchips.
The work, led by Belgian-based nanotechnology research group IMEC, has proven the potential for 45 nanometre-scale chips to be used for radio frequency (RF) applications that require high speed [...]

July 29, 2009
A study published July 30 in the journal Nature offers an explanation for the origin of dwarf spheroidal galaxies. The research may settle an outstanding puzzle in understanding galaxy formation.
Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are small and very faint, containing few stars relative to their total mass. They appear to be made mostly of dark [...]

July 29, 2009
Betelgeuse — the second brightest star in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter) — is a red supergiant, one of the biggest stars known, and almost 1000 times larger than our Sun. It is also one of the most luminous stars known, emitting more light than 100 000 Suns. Such extreme properties foretell [...]

July 28, 2009
Scientists in Brazil report the controllable formation of quantum turbulence in an ultra-cold atom gas. The results, which appear in the July 20 issue of Physical Review Letters and are highlighted in the APS journal Physics may make it easier to characterize quantum turbulence – and potentially even classical turbulence – because it [...]

July 27,2009
Researchers at TU Delft have succeeded in measuring the influence of a single electron on a vibrating carbon nanotube. This research can be important for work such as the development of ultra-small measuring instruments.  The scientists have published their results on Thursday 23 July in the online version of the scientific journal Science.
The scientists [...]

July 27,2009
Scientists at Penn State University, in collaboration with institutes in the US, Finland, Germany and the UK, have figured out the long-sought structure of a layer of C60 – carbon buckyballs – on a silver surface. The results, which could help in the design of carbon nanostructure-based electronics are reported in Physical Review Letters [...]

July 27, 2009
By studying gold nanoparticles with highly uniform sizes and shapes, scientists now understand how they lose energy, a key step towards producing nanoscale detectors for weighing any single atom.
Such ultrasensitive measurements could ultimately be used in areas such as medical research and diagnostics, enabling the detection of minuscule disease-causing agents such as [...]