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

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the basement of Hoyt Laboratory at Princeton University, Alexei Tyryshkin clicked a computer mouse and sent a burst of microwaves washing across a silicon crystal suspended in a frozen cylinder of stainless steel.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Fusion Pellet Fueling Lab has been at the center of design and testing of plasma fueling systems for tokamak research applications for decades. Since the mid-1970s, lab researchers have been designing, testing and contributing hardware for fusion magnetic confinement experiments here in the United States and around the world

New research by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) will improve the accuracy of estimates of the time of geological events. The work centres on the calibration of one of the world's slowest clocks, known as the 'argon-argon clock'.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador have found that, at just the right temperatures, nanoclusters form and improve the flow of electrical current through certain oxide materials.

By focusing proton beams using high-intensity lasers, a team of scientists have discovered a new way to heat material and create new states of matter in the laboratory.

The National Physical Laboratory Acoustics team has been investigating acoustic cavitation – the formation and implosion of micro cavities, or bubbles, in a liquid caused by the extreme pressure variations of high intensity sound waves – using the new NPL reference vessel and a chemical commonly found at crime scenes.

Starting from the behavior of small flames in the laboratory, a team of researchers has gained new insights into the titanic forces that drive Type Ia supernova explosions. These stellar explosions are important tools for studying the evolution of the universe, so a better understanding of how they behave would help answer some of the fundamental questions in astronomy.

In case you missed the news, a team of physicists reported in September that the tiny subatomic particles known as neutrinos could violate the cosmic speed limit set by Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The researchers, working on an experiment called OPERA, beamed neutrinos through the earth’s crust, from CERN, the laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, to Gran Sasso National Laboratory in L’Aquila, Italy, an underground physics lab. According to the scientists’ estimates, the neutrinos arrived at their destination around 60 nanoseconds quicker than the speed of light

Since its founding in 1949, McIntosh Laboratory has been closely associated with tube amplifiers—and its MC275 tube amp, first introduced in 1961, has remained a favorite among tube-loving audiophiles. But with changing times, McIntosh ceased production of its tube-based amps 10 years later, giving in to an industry that, at ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Heated to extreme temperatures of up to 150 million degrees Celsius, the plasma in ITER's giant experimental fusion reactor will be fed a fuel of frozen pellets of deuterium-tritium, fired into the tokamak vacuum vessel by pellet injectors. Testing of the most recent pellet injection design technology developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and US ITER is under way this fall at the DIII-D research tokamak in San Diego, operated by General Atomics for the Department of Energy through the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences.

(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.

An advanced material that could help bring about next-generation "spintronic" computers has revealed one of its fundamental secrets to a team of scientists from Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

(PhysOrg.com) -- It's a basic technique learned early, maybe even before kindergarten: Pulling things apart - from toy cars to complicated electronic materials - can reveal a lot about how they work. "That's one way physicists study the things that they love; they do it by destroying them," said S

Perhaps one of Leonardo da Vinci's greatest paintings has never been reprinted in books of his art. Known as the "Battle of Anghiari," it was abandoned and then lost—until a determined Italian engineer gave the art world hope that it still existed, and a physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory developed a technique that may reveal it to the world once again.

For the first time, a team of French physicists, supported by CNES and ESA, has succeeded in developing a vibration-resistant cold atom accelerometer. Tested in parabolic flight, this prototype was able to measure infinitesimal accelerations, which until now was only possible in the laboratory. This could pave the way for the development of portable cold atom accelerometers and thus improved positioning and geological prospecting systems