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Aiming to take "clean" to a whole new level, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland at College Park have teamed up to study how low-temperature plasmas can deactivate potentially dangerous biomolecules left behind by conventional sterilization methods. Using low-temperature plasmas is a promising technique for sterilization and deactivation of surgical instruments and medical devices, but the researchers say its effectiveness isn't fully understood yet.

Aiming to take "clean" to a whole new level, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland at College Park have teamed up to study how low-temperature plasmas can deactivate potentially dangerous biomolecules left behind by conventional sterilization methods.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Engineering researchers at the University of Toronto have developed the world's most efficient organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) on plastic. This result enables a flexible form factor, not to mention a less costly, alternative to traditional OLED manufacturing, which currently relies on rigid glass.

(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.

Electrical engineers in Bochum, Germany, have succeeded in developing a new concept for ultrafast semiconductor lasers.

German scientists succeeded in calculating the time evolution of the vacuum decay in detail.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Double-core-hole (DCH) states – in which two electrons are ejected from their positions, creating vacancies – occurring at different atomic sites are very sensitive to the chemical environment of the two holes.

Cosmetics and pharmaceutical drug delivery systems could be improved thanks to a new method developed to precisely measure the capability of capsule-like biological membranes to change shape under external stress. This work is outlined in a study about to be published in European Physical Journal E by Philippe Meleard and Tanja Pott from the Rennes-based Institute of Chemical Sciences at the European University of Brittany and their colleagues from the Center for Biomembrane Physics at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.

Light and electric current can both be used for computing, albeit with key differences. Whereas conventional computers do logic through the movement of electrons, newer and faster computers called quantum computers perform the same job using single particles of light, known as photons.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Berkeley Lab, a partner in the Heavy Ion Fusion Sciences Virtual National Laboratory (HIFS VNL) with Lawrence Livermore and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, has been a leader in developing a special kind of accelerator for experiments aimed at fusion power, called an induction accelerator. The induction principle is like a string of transformers with two windings, where the accelerator beam itself is the second winding. Induction accelerators can handle ions with suitable kinetic energy at higher currents (many more charged particles in the beam), much more efficiently than RF accelerators.

Scientists who threw down the gauntlet to physics by reporting particles that broke the Universe's speed limit said on Friday they were revisiting their contested experiment.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The merging of two technologies under development - plasmonics and nanophotonics - is promising the emergence of new "quantum information systems" far more powerful than today's computers.

Physicists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) are opening a new window into the life of biological cells, using a technique that lets them grab the ends of a single protein molecule and pull, making continuous, direct measurements as it unfolds and refolds. Their latest results, reported in the journal Science, reveal a complex network of intermediate structural and kinetic states along the way to functionally correct folded forms, including both express routes and dead ends. Better understanding of protein folding is essential because incorrectly folded proteins cause diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's

Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae." Perlmutter heads the international Supernova Cosmology Project, which pioneered the methods used to discover the accelerating expansion of the universe, and he has been a leader in studies to determine the nature of dark energy.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new computational approach to improve the utility of superconductive materials for specific design applications – and have used the approach to solve a key research obstacle for the next-generation superconductor material yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO).