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(PhysOrg.com) -- A matchbook-sized atomic clock 100 times smaller than its commercial predecessors has been created by a team of researchers at Symmetricom Inc.

Watching things disappear "is an amazing experience," admits Joachim Fischer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. But making items vanish is not the reason he creates invisibility cloaks.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The long running debate on whether cell phones are capable of damaging human tissue and causing health problems received new fuel from a paper published at arXiv by theoretical biologist Bill Bruno from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

(PhysOrg.com) -- For at least 20 years, organic chemists and materials scientists have used microwaves as an alternative energy source to activate materials and break chemical bonds. However, though microwaves are clearly useful, scientists have remained largely in the dark on exactly how they provide special heating properties.

A team of researchers at MIT has found a way to manipulate both the thermal conductivity and the electrical conductivity of materials simply by changing the external conditions, such as the surrounding temperature. And the technique they found can change electrical conductivity by factors of well over 100, and heat conductivity by more than threefold.

The underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy is the home of the Xenon100 experiment, which is being conducted as an international collaboration that includes the Heidelberg-based Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics to detect the mysterious particles directly.

Like the billions of tiny neutrinos that zip through the Earth every second, scientific exchanges will be flying thick and fast in Madison.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Four theoretical physicists, led by Allan Widom, of Northeastern University, have published a paper in arXiv, where they show a possible way for some bacteria to produce radio waves. Taking note of the fact that bacteria DNA forms in loops rather than the familiar helix seen in humans, Widom, et al, describe a process whereby free electrons that flow through such a loop by hopping from atom to atom, wind up producing photons when energy levels change.

(PhysOrg.com) -- As part of the European Union's commitment to remaining at the forefront of technology, the European Commission (the governing body of the European Union) has laid out plans for three initial high powered lasers to be built in Eastern Europe with a fourth to come at a later date. The first superlaser in the project is to be built near Prague, with a goal of achieving exawatt class, which would make it at least a hundred times more powerful than anything that exists today.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The AMS particle detector will take off on 29 April 2011 at 21.47 CEST onboard the very last mission of the space Shuttle Endeavour.

Researchers at Northwestern University have created a new kind of cloaking material that can render objects invisible in the terahertz range.

Valley-based electronics, also known as valleytronics, is one step closer to reality. Two researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have shown that the valley degree of freedom in graphene can be polarized through scattering off a line defect. Unlike previously proposed valley filters in graphene, which rely on confined structures that have proven hard to achieve experimentally, the present work is based on a naturally occurring line defect that has already been observed.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Like atomic-level bricklayers, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory are using a precise atom-by-atom layering technique to fabricate an ultrathin transistor-like field effect device to study the conditions that turn insulating materials into high-temperature superconductors.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Wesleyan University have used computer simulations to gain basic insights into a fundamental problem in material science related to glass-forming materials, offering a precise mathematical and physical description* of the way temperature affects the rate of flow in this broad class of materials -- a long-standing goal.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Portuguese physicists might have finally solved the decades old mystery of why the Pioneer probes, launched in the early 70’s, haven’t been decelerating from the Sun’s gravitational pull at the rate expected; it seems it might be something as mundane as adding in the tiny forces that occur when minute traces of heat from the plutonium on board the probes bounce off their receiving dishes, creating a counterforce, which in turn, causes the craft to slow; if ever so slightly.