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Different materials integrated into a single electronic device ...

It's now more or less official: element 117 will have a seat at the periodic table. Earlier this month an international team of scientists that included researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Nuclear Science Division found two atoms of superheavy element 117. The experiment, conducted at a particle accelerator at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, builds...

They shed light on atomic and molecular processes: ultrashort laser pulses are required to study extremely fast quantum phenomena. For years, scientists have been trying to tune the shape of light waves so as to, for instance, steer an electron on exactly the right path. At the TU Vienna, an extraordinarily powerful new method to influence the shape of the laser light wave has been developed in cooperation...

Is it a harmless parcel or a bomb, an innocent letter or a drug shipment? A new terahertz scanner is capable of detecting illicit drugs and explosives sent by post without having to open suspicious packages or envelopes....

Researchers at MIT have discovered a new way of harnessing temperature gradients in fluids to propel objects. In the natural world, the mechanism may influence the motion of icebergs floating on the sea and rocks moving through subterranean magma chambers....

(Phys.org) —Although mass may seem to be a fairly straightforward concept, from a physics perspective it can be much more complex than weighing an object and reading off a number in grams. For instance, an object's mass can be modified by putting it in a different medium....

(Phys.org) —A chip-scale device that both produces and detects a specialized gas used in biomedical analysis and medical imaging has been built and demonstrated at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Described in Nature Communications, the new microfluidic chip produces polarized (or magnetized) xenon gas and then detects even the faintest magnetic signals from the gas....

Researchers led by Yoshiyuki Miyamoto predicted from numerical simulations that weak cohesive forces acting among molecules and atoms that are not chemically bonded can be strengthened by irradiation of light whose wavelength (related to its energy) is tuned. The cause of strengthening the cohesive forces is induction of oscillating positive and negative charges on molecules/atoms which generates electric...

Antireflection coatings are familiar from their use in everyday optical devices, such as glasses and lenses. They can increase the amount of light that passes through optical instruments by reducing the fraction of light reflected (and hence lost) at surfaces. Antireflection coatings have applications beyond visible light: for instance, in the infrared and terahertz regimes they are useful for chemical...

Researchers have found a new way to study how the DNA and proteins interact inside a cell structure. These reactions last only a fraction of a second, and therefore required a new approach to conventional observing methods. Within the European research project ATLAS, scientists in Naples have now created a LASER-based prototype that fixates these cross-links and thus makes the brief interactions inside...

Analysis of a manganese-based crystal by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has produced the first clear picture of its molecular structure. The findings could help explain the magnetic and electronic behavior of the whole family of crystals, many of which have potential for use in batteries....

Dark alleys might not feel so dangerous someday thanks to a new ultra-thin type of lens, which could pave the way to making smaller and cheaper heat-sensing imagers. A team of French researchers has found a way to make a thermal infrared (IR) camera with a lens made of silicon, a much less expensive material than is commonly used today....

University of Cambridge physicist Luke Butcher has uploaded a paper to the arXiv preprint server suggesting that there might exist some type of wormhole that is capable of staying open long enough for a photon to pass through—which of course suggests the possibility of sending messages backwards or forwards in time....

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Fusion-reactor scientists grapple with politics and funding woes ...

(Phys.org) —As part of the ongoing effort to curtail illicit trafficking of nuclear materials, scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin studied inverse modeling of spectral X-ray radiography to determine the presence of nuclear materials in small containers or composite objects, such as baggage. In their examination, the researchers applied an inversion...