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Meet the companies behind the lighting, shotcrete, rails, and wheels at a skate park in San Jose, California. Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park, San Jose, California | February 11, 2012 | 5:04 p.m. Wheels Bones Skatepark Formula wheels, manufactured by Santa Barbara, California-based Skate One, are made of urethane formulated to resist abrasion

A team of physicists at UC Santa Barbara has seen the light, and it comes in many different colors.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on the nanoscale and the ever-elusive quantum computer are among the advancements edging closer toward the realm of possibility, and a new study co-authored by a UC Santa Barbara researcher may give both an extra nudge. The findings appear today in Science Express, an online version of the journal Science.

Researchers in the Computational Materials Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have uncovered the fundamental limits on optical transparency in the class of materials known as transparent conducting oxides. Their discovery will support development of energy efficiency improvements for devices that depend on optoelectronic technology, such as light- emitting diodes and solar cells.

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Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists.

A discovery by physicists at UC Santa Barbara may earn silicon carbide -- a semiconductor commonly used by the electronics industry -- a role at the center of a new generation of information technologies designed to exploit quantum physics for tasks such as ultrafast computing and nanoscale sensing.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have developed a new and highly efficient way to characterize the structure of polymers at the nanoscale – effectively designing a routine analytical tool that could be used by industries that rely on polymer science to innovate new products, from drug delivery gels to renewable bio-materials.

This year is slated to be one of the most charred on record, as wildfires have burned more than 7.5 million U.S. acres to date.

Physicists working at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Konstanz in Germany have developed a breakthrough in the use of diamond in quantum physics, marking an important step toward quantum computing. The results are reported in this week's online edition of Nature Physics.

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.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, say they've figured out the cause of a problem that's made light-emitting diodes (LEDs) impractical for general lighting purposes. Their work will help engineers develop a new generation of high-performance, energy-efficient lighting that could replace incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.

(PhysOrg.com) -- David D.

Alcoholics Anonymous, celebrating its 76th anniversary this year, counts two million mem