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

(Phys.org) -- Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have captured the most detailed images to date of airborne soot particles, a key contributor to global warming and a health hazard.

(Phys.org) -- Researchers have taken a step toward overcoming a key obstacle in commercializing "hyperbolic metamaterials," structures that could bring optical advances including ultrapowerful microscopes, computers and solar cells.

Conventional wisdom says they're a pain. In reality, they are doing you a huge favor.

A team of physicists at UC Santa Barbara has seen the light, and it comes in many different colors.

In a new approach to invisibility cloaking, a team of French researchers has proposed isolating or cloaking objects from sources of heat—essentially "thermal cloaking." This method, which the researchers describe in the Optical Society's open-access journal Optics Express, taps into some of the same principles as optical cloaking and may lead to novel ways to control heat in electronics and, on an even larger scale, might someday prove useful for spacecraft and solar technologies.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s biggest magnet facility today met the grand challenge of producing magnetic fields in excess of 100 tesla while conducting six different experiments. The hundred-tesla level is roughly equivalent to 2 million times Earth’s magnetic field.

A little more than three years ago a medical team from Berlin published the results of a unique experiment that astonished HIV researchers. The German group had taken bone marrow--the source of the body’s immune cells--from an anonymous donor whose genetic inheritance made him or her naturally resistant to HIV.

A team of religion scholars ignited a firestorm of controversy this week with the release of a documentary film and book claiming to shed light on the burial practices of 1st-century Christians living near Jerusalem. Although there’s a good deal of debate over what the researchers have actually discovered, it’s interesting to note that this debate has been made possible by a high-definition camera setup enabling documentary filmmakers to capture images from inside a tomb buried beneath two meters of rock without entering the site or in any way disturbing its contents. In December 2010, filmmaker Simcha Jacobivici and his crew snaked a high-definition camera down into what’s come to be known as the “Patio tomb,” discovered in 1981 about five kilometers south of the Old City in East Jerusalem and so named because it’s now located beneath an apartment patio.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have long known that butterfly wings produce their iridescent colors by bouncing light around and between tiny ridges in structures made of chitin. More recently they’ve discovered that the chitin material in their wings also expands when struck by infrared radiation which causes a change in its refraction index, converting it to visible light. Now, by adding a layer of carbon nanotubes to the wing material, the researchers have found they are able to increase the amount of heat absorbed.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have found a way to distort the atomic arrangement and change the magnetic properties of an important class of electronic materials with ultra-short pulses of terahertz (mid-infrared) laser light without heating the material up. While the achievement is currently of purely scientific interest, the researchers say this new approach control could ultimately lead to extremely fast, low-energy, non-volatile computer memory chips or data-switching devices.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Chemical Engineering are the first to show that mechanical property changes in cells may be responsible for cancer progression — a discovery that could pave the way for new approaches to predict, treat and prevent cancer.

Jurassic meow? Scientists at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, have come up with a novel idea for possibly saving endangered big cats: reproduce them in the lab.

(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.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology and the University of British Columbia have shown that the interaction between a light pulse and a light-absorbing object, including the momentum transfer and resulting movement of the object, can be calculated for any positive index of refraction using a few, well-established physical principles combined with a new model for mass transfer from light to matter.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology and the University of British Columbia have shown that the interaction between a light pulse and a light-absorbing object, including the momentum transfer and resulting movement of the object, can be calculated for any positive index of refraction using a few, well-established physical principles combined with a new model for mass transfer from light to matter.