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(PhysOrg.com) -- Does helium-4 become a "supersolid" near absolute zero? What previous researchers thought might be a supersolid transition is better explained by changes in the solid's resistance to shearing, according to new research by J.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Magnetic materials in which the north and south poles can be reversed with an electric field may be ideal candidates for low-power electronic devices, such as those used for ultra-high data storage.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The quest to develop a so-called room-temperature superconductor – one that exhibits lossless electronic transmission – has long fueled both popular and scientific imagination. At the same time, however, ongoing efforts to raise the still-frigid temperatures at which certain materials display superconductivity are making incremental progress. That research – historically based on lattice and/or spin-based interpretations of electron pairing – has now taken a potentially significant step forward thanks to a theoretical view of how electron orbital pairing in a class of materials known as ferropnictides may provide a new road to high transition temperature superconductivity.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the push toward ever-smaller and ever-faster data transmission technology, a team of Stanford electrical engineers has produced a nanoscale laser that is much faster and vastly more energy efficient than anything available today.

(PhysOrg.com) -- "Human beings are more or less like a computer," Jian-Jun Shu tells PhysOrg.com. "We do computing work, and our DNA can be used in computing operations." Shu is a professor at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. "For some problems, DNA-based computing could replace silicon-based computing, offering many advantages."

Bubbles are blocking the current path of one of the most promising high temperature superconducting materials, new research suggests.

Many people worry about the manner of their death. Death by car accident, death by cancer and death by gunshot are some of the more dreaded ways to go. No less awful is the prospect of death by snakebite.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Taking another step toward demonstrating quantum behavior in a quantum computer, researchers from the Vancouver-based company D-Wave Systems, Inc., have performed a technique called quantum annealing, which could provide the computational model for a quantum processor.

Light does not travel at the same speed in all directions under the effect of an electromagnetic field. Although predicted by theory, this counter-intuitive effect has for the first time been demonstrated experimentally in a gas by a French team from the Laboratoire 'Collisions Agregats Reactivite' at CNRS. The researchers measured with extreme precision, of around one billionth m/s, the difference between the light propagation speeds in one direction and in the opposite direction.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center and Columbia University, working with the X-Ray Microscopy Group, have mapped rotation and strain fields across a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) structure that included a liner of stressed Si3N4 using X-ray nanodiffraction (nano-XRD) at the CNM/APS Hard X-Ray Nanoprobe beamline.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are working with medical researchers at Loma Linda University Medical Center to develop a new imaging technology to guide proton therapy for cancer treatment.

Stewart Prager, a well-known plasma physicist and fusion scientist with a distinguished career and a record of discovery at the University of Wisconsin, arrived in January 2009 as director of PPPL, the United States’ leading magnetic fusion facility. Fusion energy, which is fueled by hot gases of charged particles known as plasma, has the potential to become a safe, clean and abundant energy source for the future. For nearly 60 years, Princeton has been a world leader in research on magnetic fusion energy due to efforts by scientists and engineers at PPPL

In the 1980s and ’90s, competition in the computer industry was all about "clock speed" — how many megahertz, and ultimately gigahertz, a chip could boast. But clock speeds stalled out almost 10 years ago: Chips that run faster also run hotter, and with existing technology, there seems to be no way to increase clock speed without causing chips to overheat.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a new study, scientists have proposed that mini black holes may interact with matter very differently than previously thought. If the proposal is correct, it would mean that the time it would take for a mini black hole to swallow the Earth would be many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the Universe.

Japanese scientists at a boozy office party stumbled across a discovery they hope will help revolutionise efficient energy transmission one day: red wine makes a metal compound superconductive.