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(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Yale University have succeeded in building a new kind of laser based on the way brightly colored birds show their colors. Building on the new approach to creating laser beams, whereby holes are drilled in a material in such a way as to trap light inside for a long enough period of time to create the laser light they are after, researchers Hui Cao, Heeso Noh and their colleagues describe in a paper they've published in Physical Review Letters, how they've emulated the way birds use air holes to display their colors.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Ocean waves can be incredibly strong and very difficult to block completely. When a wave moving across the ocean interacts with a buoy, the wave can be slightly dampened, but will still pass by if its wavelength is long enough compared to the size of the buoy

A bold new design for thin film solar cells that requires significantly less silicon – and may boost their efficiency – is the result of an industry/academia collaboration between Oerlikon Solar in Switzerland and the Institute of Physics' photovoltaic group at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

(PhysOrg.com) -- As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ramps up the rate and impact of its collisions, physicists hope to witness the emergence of the Higgs boson, an anticipated, but as-yet-unseen, fundamental particle that scientists believe gives mass to matter.

How the particles that constitute a proton give rise to is to its rotation, or ‘spin’, is an intriguing open question of contemporary particle physics. A technique that could provide some answers has been developed using the world’s only polarized proton–proton collider. The work was published by the PHENIX Collaboration, which includes researchers from the RIKEN Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) Research Center in Upton, USA.

A silent jetpack would be like swimming in air, but it is likely beyond the physics of thrust In "Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun, or they might be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists in China and the US have modified a common thermoelectric material to vastly improve its thermoelectric properties. The development could lead to new devices capable of converting waste heat into useful amounts of electricity.

University of Oregon researcher Richard Taylor is on a quest to grow flowers that will help people who've lost their sight, such as those suffering from macular degeneration, to see again.

With images of the Japan earthquake and tsunami fresh in the minds of coastal dwellers everywhere, tsunami science is getting a fresh infusion of interest, and cash, in the U.S. From giant wave basins in Oregon to current-speed detectors in California, the U.S. is expanding its tsunami research, especially in the Pacific Northwest states that researchers say face grave risk of big-wave destruction

(PhysOrg.com) -- By using one light pulse to control another, researchers have proposed a design for an optical transistor that fulfills the most challenging criteria set forth in a study last year. An optical transistor has long been sought by physicists because it could be used for optical computing, in which photons rather than electrons are used to perform digital computations.

Portuguese physicists report that they have identified the unknown force whose influence on outward bound interplanetary space probes has puzzled scientists since 1998.

Researchers of the University of Vienna used a quantum mechanical system in the laboratory to simulate complex many-body systems. This experiment promises future quantum simulators enormous potential insights into unknown quantum phenomena.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Sparking controversy in the small circle of physicists working to resolve the issue of whether dark matter actually exists, Juan Collar, spokesman for the CoGeNT project in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, spoke recently at the American Physical Society meeting and disclosed that his team has found results similar to those experienced by the DAMA/LIBRA team in Italy over the past several years, which show an excess of low energy interactions in their germanium crystal detectors, that his group can’t explain any other way but to ascribe it to the existence of dark matter.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers in the Materials Science and Technology division of the Naval Research Laboratory have recently demonstrated electrical injection, detection and precession of spin accumulation in silicon, the cornerstone material of modern device technology, at temperatures up to 225 degrees Celsius.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Seventeen minutes may not seem like much, but to physicists working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) project at the CERN physics complex near Geneva, 1000 seconds is nearly four orders of magnitude better than has ever been achieved before in capturing and holding onto antimatter atoms.