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Are there parallel universes? And how will we know?

(PhysOrg.com) -- A trio of Japanese physicists have applied a reformulation of string theory, called IIB, whereby matrices are used to describe the properties of the physical universe, on a supercomputer, to effectively show that the universe spontaneously ballooned in three directions, leaving the other six dimensions tightly wrapped, as string theory has predicted all along.

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the laws of nature may vary across the Universe, according to a study published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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(PhysOrg.com) -- The world's first x-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), first unveiled in 2009 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto California, has been undergoing testing by group of physicists determined to find out how many of the photons it emits are synchronized and have found, as they describe in their paper in Physical Review Letters, the x-ray radiation that it produces, is the most coherent ever measured.

The science of light and liquids has been intimately entwined since L

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of physicists comprised of members from IBM Research in Switzerland and the University of Liverpool in the U.K. have figured out a way to improve on results obtained using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) that allows for the orbitals of single molecules to be mapped. They have published a paper on Physical Review Letters describing their procedure.

Although high-temperature superconductors are widely used in technologies such as MRI machines, explaining the unusual properties of these materials remains an unsolved problem for theoretical physicists. Major progress in this important field has now been reported by physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a pair of papers published back-to-back in the July 29 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Sooner or later, everything goes online. Music, books, newspapers, magazines, TV shows, movies, software, classified ads, restaurant menus, maps, and on and on. It’s fun to watch these industries reinvent themselves in the digital age

A designer metamaterial has shown it can engineer emitted "blackbody" radiation with an efficiency beyond the natural limits imposed by the material's temperature, a team of researchers led by Boston College physicist Willie Padilla report in the current edition of Physical Review Letters.

by Chloe McIver of Nature magazine Turtles should sit on the same branch of the tree of life as lizards, according to a genetic analysis that could clear up a long-standing mystery over the creature's origin. Palaeontologists have long used morphological data, obtained by looking closely at the physical characteristics of fossils and living relatives, to show the evolutionary relationship between different species.

Institute for Solid State Physics, the University of Tokyo and RIKEN announced that researchers from both institutes succeeded in the magnetic control of anomalous Hall effect (AHE) induced by spin chirality.

Tohoku University, Osaka University and Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) announced that they succeeded in directly observing electron spins in a topological insulator.

Just as shrinking transistors makes computers more powerful, brains with smaller components could in principle pack in more power and become faster. Human neurons, however--and in particular, their long “tails,” called axons--may already be at (or close to) their physical limit.

In recent years, UC Santa Barbara scientists showed that they could reproduce a basic superconductor using Einstein's general theory of relativity. Now, using the same theory, they have demonstrated that the Josephson junction could be reproduced. The results are explained in a recent issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.