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(PhysOrg.com) -- Sometime soon, microchip fabricators will take the next major step in the relentless reduction of feature size, from the current minimum of 22 nm down to 10 nm and perhaps even smaller. Getting there, however, will entail much more than incremental progress

Oh Albert.

Scientists at the world's largest atom smasher have new data that shows with greater certainty where to find a long-sought theoretical particle that would help explain the origins of the universe.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) have for the first time engineered and detected the presence of high angular momentum collisions between atoms at temperatures close to absolute zero. Previous experiments with ultracold atoms featured essentially head-on collisions. The JQI experiment, by contrast, is able to create more complicated collisions between atoms using only lasers

(PhysOrg.com) -- What does a proton look like? The common answer to this question is that protons are much too small to scatter light, and since light is necessary for us to see things, protons do not “look” like anything. But in a new study, physicists have gathered sufficient evidence to show that, at least at very high energies, the proton is a black disk – sort of an elongated hockey puck.

(PhysOrg.com) -- An international collaboration led by the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology

The tiny hairs on the abdomen of a cricket have inspired researchers at the University of Twente, to make a new type of sensor which is ultra sensitive to air flows. These synthetic cricket hairs can now also be tuned very precisely for a certain range of frequencies: the hairs are 10 times more sensitive in this range

(PhysOrg.com) -- Computer scientists at UC San Diego, who set out to simulate all rainbows found in nature, wound up answering questions about the physics of rainbows as well. The scientists recreated a wide variety of rainbows – primary rainbows, secondary rainbows, redbows that form at sunset and cloudbows that form on foggy days – by using an improved method for simulating how light interacts with water drops of various shapes and sizes.

Scientists have shown the energy conditions, under which a weak signal supplied to a physical system emerges as a stronger signal at the output thanks to the presence of random noise (a process known as stochastic resonance), in a paper that has just been published in European Physical Journal B.

Dark matter, the mysterious stuff thought to make up about 80 percent of matter in the universe, has become even more inscrutable.

(PhysOrg.com) -- We've all heard that no two snowflakes are alike. Caltech professor of physics Kenneth Libbrecht will tell you that this has to do with the ever-changing conditions in the clouds where snow crystals form. Now Libbrecht, widely known as the snowflake guru, has shed some light on a grand puzzle in snowflake science: why the canonical, six-armed "stellar" snowflakes wind up so thin and flat.

By focusing proton beams using high-intensity lasers, a team of scientists have discovered a new way to heat material and create new states of matter in the laboratory.

Life-threatening viruses such as HIV, SARS, hepatitis and influenza, could soon be combatted in an unusual manner as researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of plasma for inactivating and preventing the replication of adenoviruses.

Professor Dr.

Exotic materials called topological insulators, discovered just a few years ago, have yielded some of their secrets to a team of MIT researchers. For the first time, the team showed that light can be used to obtain information about the spin of electrons flowing over the material’s surface, and has even found a way to control these electron movements by varying the polarization of a light source.