Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Researchers at MIT have succeeded in making a fine thread that functions as a diode, a device at the heart of modern electronics. This feat — made possible by a new approach to a type of fiber manufacturing known as fiber drawing — could open up possibilities for fabricating a wide variety of electronic and photonic devices within composite fibers, using a variety of materials.

This year's Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics will be awarded to Professor Orazio Svelto for his pioneering, long-lasting and innovative work in the fields of lasers and optics. Svelto is an internationally renowned laser and photonics scientist and one of the worldwide leaders of the scientific community in this field. The award, accompanied by EUR 5,000, will be presented on 24 May 2011 at the Laser World of Photonics Congress in Munich, Germany.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Rice University researchers have created a method to measure the axial rotation of tiny rods. The technique detailed in a paper by Sibani Lisa Biswal and her colleagues appears this month in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The ability to image single biological molecules in a living cell is something that has long eluded researchers; however, a novel technique, using the structure of diamond, may well be able to do this and potentially provide a tool for diagnosing, and eventually developing a treatment for, hard-to-cure diseases such as cancer.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee have for the first time successfully characterized the earliest structural formation of the disease type of the protein that causes Huntington's disease. The incurable, hereditary neurological disorder is always fatal and affects one in 10,000 Americans.

Gaining and maintaining a strong foothold in the European and global technology markets is high on the EU agenda. Helping meet this goal is the ELI ('Extreme light infrastructure') project, which clinched EUR 6 million under the Research Infrastructures budget line of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to build a laser of intensity sufficient to rip photons into electron-positron pairs.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a paper published on arXiv, Cuban physicist Ernesto Althsuler and his team at the University of Havana, describe how they set out to reproduce a phenomenon they had observed while brewing the Argentinean drink mate, a type of tea. Althsuler noticed that after causing hot water to drop from one vessel down a very slight waterfall into another containing tea leaves, some of the leaf particulates managed to make their way back up the waterfall and into the hot water vessel.

(PhysOrg.com) -- It is very difficult to overestimate the importance of colloidal suspensions. Besides being an integral part of our everyday life (food, cosmetics, drugs), they also serve as an excellent model system for basic science.

A biomechanical experiment conducted at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science has answered a long-standing theoretical question: Will microorganisms swim faster or slower in elastic fluids? For a prevalent type of swimming, undulation, the answer is 'slower.'

Scientists from the University of Sheffield have developed pigment-free, intensely coloured polymer materials, which could provide new, anti-counterfeit devices on passports or banknotes due to their difficulty to copy.

"Seeing something invisible with your own eyes is an exciting experience," say Joachim Fischer and Tolga Ergin. For about one year, both physicists and members of the team of Professor Martin Wegener at KIT's Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) have worked on refining the structure of the Karlsruhe invisibility cloak to such an extent that it is also effective in the visible spectral range.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a powerful tool for chemical analysis and, in the form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an indispensable technique for medical diagnosis. But its uses have been limited by the need for strong magnetic fields and big, expensive, superconducting magnets. Now Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have demonstrated that they can do NMR in a zero magnetic field without using any magnets at all.

A Toledo, Ohio, physicist has implemented a new mathematical approach that accelerates some complex computer calculations used to simulate the formation of micro-thin materials.

(PhysOrg.com) -- By combining high pressure with high temperature, Livermore researchers have created a nanocyrstalline diamond aerogel that could improve the optics something as big as a telescope or as small as the lenses in eyeglasses.

Physicists said on Tuesday they believed that by the end of 2012 they could determine whether a theorised particle called the Higgs boson, which has unleashed a gruelling decades-long hunt, exists or not.