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The ability to efficiently and unobtrusively screen for trace amounts of explosives on airline passengers could improve travel safety – without invoking the ire of inconvenienced fliers. Toward that end, mechanical engineer and fluid dynamicist Matthew Staymates of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and colleagues have developed a prototype air sampling system that can quickly blow particles off the surfaces of shoes and suck them away for analysis.

Some say that the reason you can't travel faster than light is that your mass will increase as your speed approaches light speed – so, regardless of how much energy your star drive can generate, you reach a point where no amount of energy can further accelerate your spacecraft because its mass is approaching infinite.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Investigating how atoms move and rearrange themselves is fundamental to our understanding of the behavior of materials, in particular efforts aimed at engineering materials with enhanced functionality.

Goalies in the National Hockey League overwhelmingly continue to use wooden sticks largely indistinguishable from those used decades ago by their mask-less predecessors.

Researchers at the University of Twente's MESA+ research institute have developed a material capable of optical amplifications that are comparable to those achieved by the best, currently available semiconductor optical amplifiers. The researchers expect that this material will accelerate data communication and, ultimately, provide an alternative to short distance data communication (at the μm-cm scale).

A fiercely contested experiment that appears to show the accepted speed limit of the Universe can be broken has yielded the same results in a re-run, European physicists said.

Researchers the world over are seeking reliable ways to predict earthquakes, focusing on identifying seismic precursors that, if detected early enough, could serve as early warnings.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In an effort to make computer chips even faster than those of today, many researchers have recently been investigating the possibility of optical computing. In an optical computer, information is encoded as photons rather than electrons, allowing large amounts of data to be processed simultaneously. But before an optical computer can be realized, researchers need to design a 3D structure that can sufficiently manipulate light.

For the first time, engineering researchers have been able to watch in real time the nanoscale process of a ferroelectric memory bit switching between the 0 and 1 states.

The beauty of science often is contained in elegant formulas or compelling data.

The rise of computers in past decades was made possible largely thanks to the invention of the integrated circuit, a device that combines all necessary electronic components onto a single chip. In a similar vein, the success of optical computing is largely dependent on the possibility of integrating all essential optical components onto a single chip (photonic circuit). Lim Teck Guan at the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics and co-workers have now developed an enhanced alignment solution for photonic circuits.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology have succeeded in creating light from vacuum – observing an effect first predicted over 40 years ago. The results will be published tomorrow (Wednesday) in the journal Nature. In an innovative experiment, the scientists have managed to capture some of the photons that are constantly appearing and disappearing in the vacuum.

Arizona State University researchers have created a new compound crystal material that promises to help produce advances in a range of scientific and technological pursuits.

(PhysOrg.com) -- "Liquid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) has been successful for quantum information processing,” Osama Moussa tells PhysOrg.com. “However, there are some questions about scalability and other issues. There are thoughts that maybe solid states NMR could overcome some of these problems."

CERN today kicked off the High Luminosity LHC study with a workshop bringing together scientists and engineers from some 14 European institutions, supported through the European Commission’s seventh Framework programme (FP7), along with others from Japan and the USA. The goal is to prepare the ground for an LHC luminosity upgrade scheduled for around 2020.