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German researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) in close collaboration with colleagues in France and UK, have engineered a material that exhibits a rare and versatile trait in magnetism at room temperature. It's called a "multiferroic," and it means that the material has properties allowing it to be both electrically charged (ferroelectric) and also the ability to be magnetic (ferromagnetic), with its magnetisation controlled by electricity.

Surprisingly, transmitting information-rich photons thousands of miles through fiber-optic cable is far easier than reliably sending them just a few nanometers through a computer circuit. However, it may soon be possible to steer these particles of light accurately through microchips because of research performed at the Joint Quantum Institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland, together with Harvard University.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A revolutionary new chip that uses little energy and operates at ultrafast speeds for telecommunications and computing is set to replace the power-hungry, expensive and bulky equipment that currently resides at the core of the internet.

Light traveling in an optical fiber loses power over distance. A number of factors are responsible for this power loss, but one that is particularly important at high data rates is the loss that occurs due to changes in light polarization. Hui Dong at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research and co-workers1 have developed and tested a method of determining this polarization-dependent loss (PDL) in an optical fiber cable by taking measurements from just one end of the fiber

Knots can now be tied systematically in the microscopic world. A team of scientists led by Uros Tkalec from the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana (Slovenia), who has been working at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Gottingen (Germany) since September 2010, has now found a way to create every imaginable knot inside a liquid crystal.

Early Earth's atmosphere provided little shielding for ultraviolet light from space, so many prebiotic molecules, bombarded by it and light of other wavelengths, had a hard time surviving at all.

Vincent Fleury, a researcher at the Paris Diderot University, studied the early stage of development when embryonic cells first form a flat sheet of cells before folding into a U-shape, resembling a folded pancake.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Neutrons, those particles that reside here on Earth inside the nucleus of atoms, along with protons, collectively called nucleons, are thought to exist in the far reaches of the universe inside of so-named neutron stars, which are the remnants of stars that have exploded. In a paper published on the preprint server arXiv, Spanish physicists Felipe Llanes-Estrada, and Gaspar Moreno Navarro, suggest that the densities in the cores of certain sizes of such neutron stars might be so great as to squash the neutrons down from their normal spherical shape, into cubes.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have tried this with sophisticated meta-materials, but at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) it has now been done with simple metals; materials with a negative refractive index bend light the "wrong" way.

Scientists at a meeting in Grenoble, France, recently stoked speculation that physicists at the world's biggest particle accelerator may soon provide a first look at the elusive Higgs boson - the final piece of evidence needed to prove that the Standard Model of particle physics, which explains the behavior of subatomic particles, is correct.

Chemists at Harvard and three other institutions have created a purified version of an organic semiconductor with electrical properties that put it among a small handful of organic compounds and that provides an important proof of concept for a screening process to find new compounds for solar panels.

A team of University of Pennsylvania physicists has shown how to disrupt the "coffee ring effect" — the ring-shaped stain of particles leftover after coffee drops evaporate — by changing the particle shape. The discovery provides new tools for engineers to deposit uniform coatings.

Using an ultrafast femtosecond laser, researchers at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., were able to label, draw patterns on, and remove individual melanocytes cells from a species of frog tadpole (Xenopus) without damaging surrounding cells and tissues.

Researchers are able to achieve extremely high-resolution microscopy through a process known as stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy. This cutting-edge imaging system has pushed the performance of microscopes significantly past the classical limit, enabling them to image features that are even smaller than the wavelength of light used to study them. They are able to achieve this extreme vision by using a single-color fluorescent dye that absorbs and releases energy, revealing cells and cellular components (such as proteins) in unprecedented detail.

A team of researchers from four Boston-area institutions led by Nicusor Iftimia from Physical Sciences, Inc. has demonstrated for the first time that optical coherence tomography (OCT), a high resolution optical imaging technique that works by bouncing near-infrared laser light off biological tissue, can reliably distinguish between pancreatic cysts that are low-risk and high-risk for becoming malignant. Other optical techniques often fail to provide images that are clear enough for doctors to differentiate between the two types.