- Heat To Electricity: A Better Thermoelectric Materials Emulator
Thermoelectric materials were discovered in the 19th century and have the remarkable property that heating them creates a small electrical current- but adopting them to the 21st century has been a challenge. ...
Article - News Staff - Oct 25 2013 - 7:41am
- Wave Or Particle? Quantum Reality Is Fickle
Experiments on individual photons conducted by physicists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw (FUW) and the Faculty of Applied Physics and Mathematics at the Gdansk University of Technology (PG), have revealed yet another bizarre featu ...
Article - News Staff - Oct 28 2013 - 1:15pm
- Better Thermal Infrared Detection Means Better Seeing In The Dark
Thermal infrared (IR) energy is emitted from all things which have a temperature greater than absolute zero- so, basically all things worth looking at. Though mechanical detection of IR radiation has been possible since Samuel Pierpont Langley invented th ...
Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2013 - 7:30am
- 100 Percent Chance A Milky Way Supernova Will Be Visible From Earth
Astronomers have calculated the odds that, sometime during the next 50 years, a supernova occurring in our home galaxy will be visible from Earth and found the chances to be nearly 100%- and it will be visible from telescopes in the form of infrared radia ...
Article - News Staff - Oct 31 2013 - 1:19pm
- Raman Scattering: Taking Fingerprints Of The Infinitely Small
Raman scattering mode is an optical phenomenon, discovered in 1928 by the physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, that involves the inelastic scattering of photons- the physical phenomenon by which a medium can modify the frequency of the light impinging ...
Article - News Staff - Dec 4 2013 - 6:30am
- The Puzzle Of How Quantum Effects Help Plant Cells Capture Light
Experiments with ultrashort laser pulses support the idea that quantum interactions between molecules help plants, algae, and some bacteria efficiently gather light to fuel their growth- but that's about it. Key details of nature's vital light-h ...
Article - News Staff - Dec 8 2013 - 12:31pm
- Speed Up Underwater Communications By 76X- Without Bothering Whales
A project to develop fast-blinking LED systems for underwater optical communications has led to discovering that an artificial metamaterial can increase the light intensity and "blink speed" of a fluorescent light-emitting dye molecule. The nano ...
Article - News Staff - Jan 26 2014 - 4:18pm
- Blue Light Has An Immediate Effect On Fatigue
Exposure to short wavelength, blue, light during the biological day directly and immediately improves alertness and performance. In order to determine which wavelengths of light were most effective in warding off fatigue, the researchers teamed with Georg ...
Article - News Staff - Feb 3 2014 - 9:22pm
- New Technique Takes Cues From Astronomy And Ophthalmology To Sharpen Microscope Images
The complexity of biology can befuddle even the most sophisticated light microscopes because biological samples bend light in unpredictable ways, returning difficult-to-interpret information to the microscope and distorting the resulting image. New imagin ...
Article - News Staff - Apr 14 2014 - 6:43pm
- Metasurface Lens: Flat Surface Becomes A Spherical Antenna
An array of tiny, metallic, U-shaped structures deposited onto a dielectric material creates a new artificial surface that can bend and focus electromagnetic waves the same way an antenna does. ...
Article - News Staff - Apr 14 2014 - 6:47pm