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

How’s this for luck? Two tree species that scientists believed were extinct twice have been rediscovered in a remote area of Tanzania. According to a paper published in the Journal of East African Natural History , the two species were rediscovered in the remote, highly fragmented and rarely explored Namatimbili Ngarama Forest, 35 kilometers inland from the Indian Ocean.

Most light emitters, from candles to light bulbs to computer screens, look the same from any angle. But in a paper published this week on the Nature Photonics website, MIT researchers report the development of a new light source — a fiber only a little thicker than a human hair — whose brightness can be controllably varied for different viewers.

New research, published by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), takes a significant step towards changing the international definition of the kilogram – which is currently based on a lump of platinum-iridium kept in Paris. NPL has produced technology capable of accurate measurements of Planck's constant, the final piece of the puzzle in moving from a physical object to a kilogram based on fundamental constants of nature. The techniques are described in a paper published in Metrologia on the 20th February.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Ever since scientists began studying the brain, they’ve wanted to get a better look at what was going on. Researchers have poked and prodded and looked at dead cells under electron microscopes, but never before have they been able to get high resolution microscopic views of actual living brain cells as they function inside of a living animal. Now, thanks to work by physicist Stefan Hell and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, that dream is realized.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Ever since scientists began studying the brain, they’ve wanted to get a better look at what was going on. Researchers have poked and prodded and looked at dead cells under electron microscopes, but never before have they been able to get high resolution microscopic views of actual living brain cells as they function inside of a living animal. Now, thanks to work by physicist Stefan Hell and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, that dream is realized.

In a paper published in Nature Materials, a group of researchers at the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology (ICN, Spain) led by Prof. Sergio O

Optics and photonics may one day revolutionize computer technology with the promise of light-speed calculations. Storing light as memory, however, requires devices known as microresonators, an emerging technology that cannot yet meet the demands of computing. The solution, described in a paper published today in the Optical Society's (OSA) journal Optics Letters, may lie in combining light's eerie quantum properties with a previously unknown quality of optical fiber.

A fungus known as Geomyces destructans is indeed responsible for the dusting of white across bat noses and wings that has wiped out entire populations of the flying mammals, new research shows. By purposefully infecting healthy bats with the fungus--and confirming that seemingly healthy "control" bats from the same population did not get sick from a prior but hidden fungal infection--microbiologist David Blehert of the U.S.

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazine A widely touted--but controversial--molecular fountain of youth has come under fire yet again, with the publication of new data challenging the link between proteins called sirtuins and longer lifespan. In a paper published today in Nature , researchers report that overexpressing a sirtuin gene in two model organisms--the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster --does not boost longevity as had been previously reported. [More]

In a paper published in the latest issue of Nature Photonics, an international team of researchers takes an important step toward giving physicists the ability to effectively make movies of individual electrons. If the approach pans out, it would provide a way to gather data of unprecedented detail about how individual molecules interact during chemical reactions, with ramifications for not only the basic sciences but chemical engineering and pharmaceutical research as well.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A violation of one of the oldest empirical laws of physics has been observed by scientists at the University of Bristol.

Physicists Moti Fridman and colleagues at Cornell University have successfully demonstrated a so-called time cloaking device that is able to “hide” time for 15 trillionths of a second. In a paper published on arXiv, the researchers describe how they were able to cause light passing through a fiber optic cable to compress, than decompress, causing a hole or void to exist, long enough for there to be a lag between the two.

Researchers at MIT have figured out how to grow "humanized" livers inside of mice--so the little critters could soon accurately predict how our livers will respond to drugs. Mice are a boon to biomedical research; they can often predict how humans will react to certain conditions, and not too many people get upset if they die from an overdose of toxic chemicals. But mice aren't as useful in pharmaceutical research because their livers react to drugs differently than human livers

(PhysOrg.com) -- Bartosz Grzybowski, a physical chemist at Northwestern University, and his team of colleagues offer evidence in a paper published in Science, that shows that what scientists have believed to be true about the causes behind the creation of static electricity, is wrong.

In a paper published in Nature Photonics, U of T Engineering researchers report a new solar cell that may pave the way to inexpensive coatings that efficiently convert the sun's rays to electricity.