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(PhysOrg.com) -- It's been seven months since Italian physicists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi publicly demonstrated a device that they claimed could generate large amounts of excess heat through some kind of low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR). (Previous descriptions of the process as “cold fusion” are incorrect; although the process is not completely understood, it is likely a weak interaction involving neutrons, without fusion.) The physicists call this device the Energy Catalyzer, or E-Cat.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Science has taken one more step towards creating a true real-life cloaking device. Assistant Professor Andrea Alůin and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin have successfully created a cloaking device capable of "hiding" a 3D object in free space from microwaves

Although physicists from two experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider and from Fermilab’s Tevatron collider recently reported at the Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics that they didn't find the Higgs boson, they're continuing to home in on the elusive particle, prompting Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the Director General of CERN, to go on record that he believes a neutral Higgs boson will be found by the LHC by the end of 2012.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Exactly 150 years after the first color photograph was produced, scientists have devised a way of employing the full spectrum of colors from synchrotron and free-electron laser x radiation to image nanometer-sized subjects with unprecedented clarity and speed, and in three dimensions. This new research technique is expected to improve imaging on the nanoscale in the quest for advances in pharmaceutical development and new materials for next-generation technologies.

Impressive results from experiments at Diamond Light Source on magnetic lensless imaging by Fourier transform holography using extended references have been published today in Optics Express, the journal of the Optical Society of America.

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the biggest unsolved problems in astrophysics is that galaxies and galaxy clusters rotate faster than expected, given the amount of existing baryonic (normal) matter. The fast orbits require a larger central mass than the nearby stars, dust, and other baryonic objects can provide, leading scientists to propose that every galaxy resides in a halo of (as yet undetectable) dark matter made of non-baryonic particles. As one of many scientists who have become somewhat skeptical of dark matter, CERN physicist Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic has proposed that the illusion of dark matter may be caused by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum.

The steady improvement in speed and power of modern electronics may soon hit the brakes unless new ways are found to pack more structures into microscopic spaces. Unfortunately, engineers are already approaching the limit of what light—the choice tool for "tweezing" tiny features—can achieve

New research by scientists at the University of York gives a fresh perspective on the physics of black holes.

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have for the first time linked the quantum properties of two separated ions (electrically charged atoms) by manipulating them with microwaves instead of the usual laser beams, suggesting it may be possible to replace an exotic room-sized quantum computing "laser park" with miniaturized, commercial microwave technology similar to that used in smart phones.

Nature knows two opposite types of solids: one that emerges upon compression from a liquid and a second that appears if the pressure on a liquid is reduced.

For years, quantum computers have been the holy grail of quantum technology. When a normal computer has to solve a number of problems, it can only execute them one after the other. In contrast, a quantum computer could occupy several different states at the same time – and that way it could try out different possible solutions of a problem at once, finding the correct answer much faster than a normal computer ever could.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are seen as a promising replacement for the liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) used in many flat-screen televisions because they are cheaper to mass-produce. Zhikuan Chen at the A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering and co-workers have now shown how meticulous engineering of fluorescent molecules can dramatically increase OLED efficiency.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Silicon is an ideal platform for integrated photonic circuits because the material is cheap and readily available. Silicon chips with an integrated laser source capable of emitting light at a specific wavelength are particularly useful in telecommunications. Unfortunately, silicon is a material with high optical loss, which often degrades the output power and performance of the laser source.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Alexey Snezhko and Igor Aronson, physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, have coaxed "micro-robots" to do their bidding.

(PhysOrg.com) -- An undergraduate student has overcome a major hurdle in the development of invisibility cloaks by adding an optical device into their design that not only remains invisible itself, but also has the ability to slow down light.