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

When stacking apples on a market stall, fruit sellers "naturally" adopt a particular arrangement: a regular pyramid with a triangular base. A French-German team, which includes in particular the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, has demonstrated that this arrangement is favored for reasons of mechanical stability. This work, which is published on the Physical Review Letters (PRL) website, could contribute to the design of organized porous materials.

Are there parallel universes? And how will we know?

(PhysOrg.com) -- A trio of Japanese physicists have applied a reformulation of string theory, called IIB, whereby matrices are used to describe the properties of the physical universe, on a supercomputer, to effectively show that the universe spontaneously ballooned in three directions, leaving the other six dimensions tightly wrapped, as string theory has predicted all along.

EPL (Europhysics Letters) has today gone beyond Earthly limits by publishing its first ever paper submitted from space.

This story is a joint project with ProPublica, PBS Frontline and McClatchy . The story will air on Frontline on Oct. 11

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of physicists comprised of members from IBM Research in Switzerland and the University of Liverpool in the U.K. have figured out a way to improve on results obtained using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) that allows for the orbitals of single molecules to be mapped. They have published a paper on Physical Review Letters describing their procedure.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a recent article in Applied Physics Letters, CNST researchers demonstrated how commercially available electro-optic modulators can be used to tailor the single photon output of quantum dots (QDs) for use in broadband quantum memories and other systems.

John Milnor, an American mathematician best known for the discovery of exotic hyperspheres, was awarded the 2011 Abel Prize , the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced March 23. [More]

A team of physicists in the United Kingdom has taken a giant step toward realizing efficient single-photon sources, which are expected to enable much-coveted completely secure optical communications, also known as "quantum cryptography." The team presents its findings in Applied Physics Letters, a journal published by the American Institute of Physics.