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Scientists from the University of Sheffield have developed pigment-free, intensely coloured polymer materials, which could provide new, anti-counterfeit devices on passports or banknotes due to their difficulty to copy.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a powerful tool for chemical analysis and, in the form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an indispensable technique for medical diagnosis. But its uses have been limited by the need for strong magnetic fields and big, expensive, superconducting magnets. Now Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have demonstrated that they can do NMR in a zero magnetic field without using any magnets at all.

A Toledo, Ohio, physicist has implemented a new mathematical approach that accelerates some complex computer calculations used to simulate the formation of micro-thin materials.

(PhysOrg.com) -- By combining high pressure with high temperature, Livermore researchers have created a nanocyrstalline diamond aerogel that could improve the optics something as big as a telescope or as small as the lenses in eyeglasses.

Physicists said on Tuesday they believed that by the end of 2012 they could determine whether a theorised particle called the Higgs boson, which has unleashed a gruelling decades-long hunt, exists or not.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Does helium-4 become a "supersolid" near absolute zero? What previous researchers thought might be a supersolid transition is better explained by changes in the solid's resistance to shearing, according to new research by J.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Magnetic materials in which the north and south poles can be reversed with an electric field may be ideal candidates for low-power electronic devices, such as those used for ultra-high data storage.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The quest to develop a so-called room-temperature superconductor – one that exhibits lossless electronic transmission – has long fueled both popular and scientific imagination. At the same time, however, ongoing efforts to raise the still-frigid temperatures at which certain materials display superconductivity are making incremental progress. That research – historically based on lattice and/or spin-based interpretations of electron pairing – has now taken a potentially significant step forward thanks to a theoretical view of how electron orbital pairing in a class of materials known as ferropnictides may provide a new road to high transition temperature superconductivity.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the push toward ever-smaller and ever-faster data transmission technology, a team of Stanford electrical engineers has produced a nanoscale laser that is much faster and vastly more energy efficient than anything available today.

Bubbles are blocking the current path of one of the most promising high temperature superconducting materials, new research suggests.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Taking another step toward demonstrating quantum behavior in a quantum computer, researchers from the Vancouver-based company D-Wave Systems, Inc., have performed a technique called quantum annealing, which could provide the computational model for a quantum processor.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center and Columbia University, working with the X-Ray Microscopy Group, have mapped rotation and strain fields across a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) structure that included a liner of stressed Si3N4 using X-ray nanodiffraction (nano-XRD) at the CNM/APS Hard X-Ray Nanoprobe beamline.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are working with medical researchers at Loma Linda University Medical Center to develop a new imaging technology to guide proton therapy for cancer treatment.

In the 1980s and ’90s, competition in the computer industry was all about "clock speed" — how many megahertz, and ultimately gigahertz, a chip could boast. But clock speeds stalled out almost 10 years ago: Chips that run faster also run hotter, and with existing technology, there seems to be no way to increase clock speed without causing chips to overheat.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a new study, scientists have proposed that mini black holes may interact with matter very differently than previously thought. If the proposal is correct, it would mean that the time it would take for a mini black hole to swallow the Earth would be many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the Universe.