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(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.

In first-of-their-kind experiments performed at the American X-ray laser LCLS, a collaboration led by researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute has been able to precisely follow how the magnetic structure of a material changes.

Physicists at the University of New South Wales have observed a new kind of interaction that can arise between electrons in a single-atom silicon transistor.

A team of researchers at the University of California, Merced, has redesigned luminescent solar concentrators to be more efficient at sending sunlight to solar cells.

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

“If you remember, Mark Twain once said, ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ If you use statistics in an improper way, you could get pretty much any result,” says Greg Landsberg, CMS’s new physics coordinator. “The role of the CMS Statistics Committee is to interpret what we see in a statistically correct way.”

(PhysOrg.com) -- Working together, Matthieu Gaudet and Steve Arscott from the University of Lille (IEMN lab) in France have built a circuit using a phenomenon known as photoelectrowetting, which allows a switch to be turned on by shining a light on it.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists studying the rotation of the Earth have long known that our planet doesn't have a perfect spin. Most believe this is due to the different types of materials that make up the core, mantle and crust, which all have different rates of spin causing inherent friction

British scientist Stephen Hawking was forced to miss a second celebration of his 70th birthday due to illness, organisers said late Thursday.

(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Notre Dame nuclear physicists Philippe Collon and Michael Wiescher are using accelerated ion beams to pinpoint the age and origin of material used in pottery, painting, metalwork and other art. The results of their tests can serve as powerful forensic tools to reveal counterfeit art work, without the destruction of any sample as required in some chemical analysis.

Researchers have succeeded in combining the power of quantum computing with the security of quantum cryptography and have shown that perfectly secure cloud computing can be achieved using the principles of quantum mechanics. They have performed an experimental demonstration of quantum computation in which the input, the data processing, and the output remain unknown to the quantum computer.

Countless Sci-Fi fans vividly remember the famous scene in Star Wars in which the Death Star obliterates the planet Alderaan.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology and Purdue University have designed and fabricated an on-chip microresonator that converts continuous laser light into ultra-short pulses consisting of a mix of well-defined frequencies, a technology with applications in advanced sensors, communications systems, and metrology.

Even the tiniest microscopic organisms make waves when they swim. In fact, dealing with these waves is a fact of life for the ulcer-causing bacteria H. pylori.

Researchers in the Computational Materials Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have uncovered the fundamental limits on optical transparency in the class of materials known as transparent conducting oxides. Their discovery will support development of energy efficiency improvements for devices that depend on optoelectronic technology, such as light- emitting diodes and solar cells.