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

Japanese scientists at a boozy office party stumbled across a discovery they hope will help revolutionise efficient energy transmission one day: red wine makes a metal compound superconductive.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Radioactive dating is used to determine everything from the age of dinosaur fossils to Native American arrowheads. A new technique recently developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory may give researchers another tool for radioactive dating that could be of particular use in studying the history of climate change.

Getting two fluids to mix in small or confined spaces is a big problem in many industries where, for instance, the introduction of one fluid can help extract another — like water pumped underground can release oil trapped in porous rock — or where the mixing of liquids is the essential point of the process. A key example of the latter is microfluidics technology, which allows for the controlled manipulation of fluids in miniscule channels often only a few hundred nanometers wide.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Stronger than steel or titanium -- and just as tough -- metallic glass is an ideal material for everything from cell-phone cases to aircraft parts. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed a new technique that allows them to make metallic-glass parts utilizing the same inexpensive processes used to produce plastic parts. With this new method, they can heat a piece of metallic glass at a rate of a million degrees per second and then mold it into any shape in just a few milliseconds.

In a four-decade, Holy Grail-like quest to fully understand what it means to be in a "supersolid" state, physicists have found that supersolid isn't always super solid. In other words, this exotic state of frozen helium appears to have liquid-like properties, says a new paper published in the journal Science on May 13, 2011.

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the most difficult problems for designing mobile devices is finding a way to minimize the size of the device while simultaneously maximizing the size of the display. To get the best of both worlds, researchers from the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in South Korea have designed and built a prototype of a seamless foldable display that folds in half without a visible crease in the middle.

As Star Trek is so fond of reminding us, we're carbon-based life forms. But the event that jump-started the universe, the Big Bang, didn't actually produce any carbon, so where the heck did it – and we – come from?

Trace gas detection, the ability to detect a scant quantity of a particular molecule -- a whiff of formaldehyde or a hint of acetone -- in a vast sea of others, underlies many important applications, from medical tests to air pollution detectors to bomb sniffers. Now, a sensor recently developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology that is hundreds of times faster and more sensitive than other similar technologies may make such detectors portable, economical and fast enough to be used everywhere.

A new software called QED (Quantitative Electron Diffraction), which has been licensed by Max Planck Innovation, has now been released by HREM Research Inc., a Japan based company, which is developing products and services in the field of High-Resolution Electron Microscopy. QED allows transmission electron microscopes to acquire novel kinds of data, opening up new possibilities in electron crystallography.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a step toward taking the most advanced atomic clocks on the road, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have designed and demonstrated a super-stable laser operating in a cramped, vibrating location—a minivan.

Whether they know it or not, anyone who's ever gotten a speeding ticket after zooming by a radar gun has experienced the Doppler effect – a measurable shift in the frequency of radiation based on the motion of an object, which in this case is your car doing 45 miles an hour in a 30-mph zone.

For the first time scientists at Max Planck Institute in Germany have achieved guiding of electrons by purely electric fields.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Cosmologists Alan Coley from Canada's Dalhousie University and Bernard Carr from Queen Mary University in London, have published a paper on arXiv, where they suggest that some so-called primordial black holes might have been created in the Big Crunch that came before the Big Bang, which lends support to the theory that the Big Bang was not a single event, but one that occurs over and over again as the universe crunches down to a single point, then blows up again, over and over.

For carbon, the basis of life, to be able to form in the stars, a certain state of the carbon nucleus plays an essential role. In cooperation with US colleagues, physicists from the University of Bonn and Ruhr-Universitat Bochum have been able to calculate this legendary carbon nucleus, solving a problem that has kept science guessing for more than 50 years.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of physicists from the United States and Russia announced today that it has developed a means for computing, with unprecedented accuracy, a tiny, temperature-dependent source of error in atomic clocks.