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(PhysOrg.com) -- The technological world of the 21st century owes a tremendous amount to advances in electrical engineering, specifically, the ability to finely control the flow of electrical charges using increasingly small and complicated circuits. And while those electrical advances continue to race ahead, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are pushing circuitry forward in a different way, by replacing electricity with light.

Launch $1-billion-worth of spare parts to the International Space Station, and you can keep Earth's orbital outpost going for another decade.

For millennia, writing has been the preferred way to convey information and knowledge from one generation to another. We first developed the ability to write on clay tablets with a point, and then settled on a reed pen, as preserved from 3000 BC in Egypt when it was used with papyrus.

A team of scientists working at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has found that increasing the amount of lithium coating in the wall of an experimental fusion reactor greatly improves the ability of experimentalists to contain the hot, ionized gas known as plasma. Adding more lithium also enhances certain plasma properties aiding the reaction, the researchers found.

Tractor beams -- the ability to trap and move objects using laser light -- are the stuff of science fiction, but a team of NASA scientists has won funding to study the concept for remotely capturing planetary or atmospheric particles and delivering them to a robotic rover or orbiting spacecraft for analysis.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Due to its high data carrying capacity and low loss, light can serve as an ideal information carrier. However, due to the high speed at which it travels, light is difficult to store

Conductors of electrical current, including copper, heat up and limit the ability to increase circuit densities. Unusual materials that exhibit the so-called ‘quantum spin Hall effect’, in which current can flow without dissipating heat, could provide an alternative to conventional metals.

German researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) in close collaboration with colleagues in France and UK, have engineered a material that exhibits a rare and versatile trait in magnetism at room temperature. It's called a "multiferroic," and it means that the material has properties allowing it to be both electrically charged (ferroelectric) and also the ability to be magnetic (ferromagnetic), with its magnetisation controlled by electricity.

The latest addition to Meridian’s Sooloos Digital Media System—which Robb Report included in its 2011 Best of the Best selections (www.robbreport.com/Best-of-the-Best-2011-Audio-Meridian-Sooloos-Digital-Media-System)—provides the system with a mass-storage, multi-zone solution. The new Media Core 600 combines 4 terabytes of storage with a high-quality digital-to-analog processor and the ability to output to six ...

For modern biologists, the ability to capture high-quality, three-dimensional (3D) images of living tissues or organisms over time is necessary to answer problems in areas ranging from genomics to neurobiology and developmental biology. The better the image, the more detailed the information that can be drawn from it.

If there were a Hall of Fame for materials, manganites would be among its members.

The future of medicine is contained in 'The Four Ps': Personalised, Predictive, Preventative, and Participatory.

We've all been fascinated by balloons. As children we used to get a balloon at the circus, and then suddenly, we're magically mystified by the ability of a toy to do the non-obvious and seemingly impossible: Float in something that we ignore and pay no attention to until something floats "in" it. [More]

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.

Drilling for natural gas is booming in Pennsylvania--thanks to fracturing shale rock with a water and chemical cocktail paired with the ability to drill in any direction. Despite homeowner complaints, however, research on how such hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is impacting local water wells has not kept pace. Now a new study that sampled water from 60 such wells has found evidence for natural gas–contamination in those within a kilometer of a new natural gas well.