MC²

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
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn — by far the largest of the giant planet’s many rings.
The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million [...]

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
Crashing a rocket into the Moon will create “one more dimple” on the lunar surface and could find water ice on Earth’s nearest neighbour, according to a Durham University expert.
Dr Vincent Eke’s research has helped inform NASA’s decision about where to crash its probes into the Moon’s surface in search of water.
The Lunar [...]

October 6, 2009
Some stars are lonely behemoths, with no surrounding planets or asteroids, while others sport a skirt of attendant planetary bodies. New research published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters explains why the composition of the stars often indicates whether their light shines into deep space, or whether a small fraction shines onto [...]

October 6, 2009
Billions of tonnes of water droplets vanish from the atmosphere in events that reveal in detail how the Sun and the stars control our everyday clouds. Researchers of the National Space Institute in the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have traced the consequences of eruptions on the Sun that screen the Earth from [...]

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
Small bits of metal may play a new role in solar power.
Researchers at Ohio State University are experimenting with polymer semiconductors that absorb the sun’s energy and generate electricity. The goal: lighter, cheaper, and more-flexible solar cells.
They have now discovered that adding tiny bits of silver to the plastic boosts the materials’ electrical [...]