Researchers have made a step toward the creation of materials that can be 'tuned' just by shining a light on them - they have succeeded in producing and measuring a coupling of photons and electrons on the surface of an unusual type of material called a topological insulator. This type of coupling had been predicted by theorists but never observed.

Their method involves shooting femtosecond (millionths of a billionth of a second) pulses of mid-infrared light at a sample of material and observing the results with an electron spectrometer, a specialized high-speed camera the team developed.

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. 

When organ donations after death are a topic, the altruism argument is easily made. But during life, it is more complex.

Kidney transplantation is the best treatment for patients with kidney failure. Unfortunately, there's a shortage of kidneys available to those in need of a transplant, and donation rates from both living and deceased donors have remained relatively unchanged over the last decade.  Some people aren't going to have willing donors or even matching ones but when the notion of paying for donations is introduced, the implication is this will be a new front in the class war - organs of poor people will be harvested for the rich.

When we imagine the sun, we imagine fire, but that isn't really accurate. The sun is plasma; particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields. 

In late September, a 200,000 mile long magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun and it ripped through the sun's atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion. Visualizers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. combined two days of satellite data to create the short movie below of this gigantic event on the sun.

Blood and bone marrow transplants have been done for decades and have always had risks of complications, like virtually any treatment for serious diseases, but a new study has found an additional one for the list: sexual health.

The Boomerang Nebula is the coldest known object in the Universe; even colder than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, which is the natural background temperature of space.