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Active optical fibers with silicon photonic chips can carry a lot more information for data interconnect than copper cables. Silicon photonics can also be the material of choice for wiring 'lab-on-a-chip' devices — however, the construction of such devices is not without its challenges.

Ironing increases the humidity of a piece of cloth by injecting water vapor in the form of steam. But how does the vapor affect the fabric? Until now, it was thought that its only effect was to soften the fibers

(PhysOrg.com) -- The transition-metal monoxide FeO is an archetypal example of a Mott insulator—a material that should conduct electricity under conventional band theories but becomes an insulator when measured, especially at low temperatures—and a major iron-bearing component of the Earth’s interior. Understanding the high-pressure behavior of this material is important for both solid-state physics and Earth science.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The eventual failure of metals, such as the aluminum in ships and airplanes, can often be blamed on breaks, or voids, in the material's atomic lattice. They're at first invisible, only microns in size, but once enough of them link up, the metal eventually splits apart.

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have combined two worlds – quantum physics and nano physics, and this has led to the discovery of a new method for laser cooling semiconductor membranes. Semiconductors are vital components in solar cells, LEDs and many other electronics, and the efficient cooling of components is important for future quantum computers and ultrasensitive sensors. The new cooling method works quite paradoxically by heating the material

A fundamental problem that has puzzled generations of scientists has finally been solved after more than 70 years.

Exotic materials called topological insulators, discovered just a few years ago, have yielded some of their secrets to a team of MIT researchers. For the first time, the team showed that light can be used to obtain information about the spin of electrons flowing over the material’s surface, and has even found a way to control these electron movements by varying the polarization of a light source.

Knowing your content cold helps. But if you still feel nervous, try one of these simple tactics.

Researchers at the University of Twente's MESA+ research institute have developed a material capable of optical amplifications that are comparable to those achieved by the best, currently available semiconductor optical amplifiers. The researchers expect that this material will accelerate data communication and, ultimately, provide an alternative to short distance data communication (at the μm-cm scale).

When doping a disordered magnetic insulator material with atoms of a nonmagnetic material, the conventional wisdom is that the magnetic interactions between the magnetic ions in the material will be weakened.

After the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two scientists in 2010 who had studied the material graphene, this substance has received a lot of attention.

Novana says it has developed an antiballistic material that is just as tough as Kevlar, but less expensive to make. Tougher Than a Speeding Bullet Kevlar has long been the bulletproof material of choice for military and law enforcement agencies.

An African bike company builds bikes for the poor, funded by selling you a super-light sweet bamboo ride. In Zambia, bicycles grow on trees, or rather bamboo, the primary building material for many Zambikes .

The expression “beauty’s only skin-deep” has often been applied to the chemistry of materials because so much action takes place at the surface.

German researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) in close collaboration with colleagues in France and UK, have engineered a material that exhibits a rare and versatile trait in magnetism at room temperature. It's called a "multiferroic," and it means that the material has properties allowing it to be both electrically charged (ferroelectric) and also the ability to be magnetic (ferromagnetic), with its magnetisation controlled by electricity.