By changing the material medium through which x-rays pass, physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have used laser light to control x-ray beams.

As a new generation of powerful light sources comes online, intense x-ray beams may be able to control matter directly and allow one beam of x-rays to control another, the new Nature Physics study suggests.

Using the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source femtosecond spectroscopy beamline 6.0.2, researchers sent ultrashort pulses of laser light and higher-frequency x-rays together through a gas cell filled with pressurized neon. Excited by the laser pulses, the gas, which normally absorbs x-rays, became transparent to the x-ray pulses during their quick passage.

Paleontologists have discovered a new bird fossil in northeast China that provides more evidence for a specialized group of small birds that diversified during the Early Cretaceous between about 130 and 120 million years ago.

The discovery also suggests that scientists have only tapped a small proportion of the birds and dinosaurs that were living at that time.

The new bird, named “Longicrusavis houi,” belongs to a group of birds known as ornithuromorphs (Ornithuromorpha), which are rare in rocks of this age. Ornithuromorphs are more closely related to modern birds than are most of the other birds from the Jehol Biota.

Not only do evil fast food companies make us fat and tempt our children with deceptive advertising, they also make us impatient, according to a new study in Psychological Science.

In fact, mere exposure to fast food and related symbols can make us impatient, increasing preference for time saving products, and reducing willingness to save, the study found.

Now that the latest battle in the invertebrate wars seems to have died down a bit (victors inconclusive, of course), I can post a list of cool things about cephalopods that have put them in the news lately, without it necessarily having to serve as ammunition. (<---WOW, that was the most awkward sentence ever, but guess who DOES NOT CARE, because she has been locked in a basement for a week writing her dissertation! HI!)

1. They used to rule the world. As I'm sure Dr. Fuchs discussed in his lecture:

Ignacio Ellacuria wrote,"with Mons. Romero God is past for El Salvador".

Like about four years ago, the name of Grigoriy Yakovlevich (Grisha) Perelman is again in the mass-media headlines all around the world.

Grisha is a prominent mathematician, who was able to solve one of the most perplexed mathematical problems of the last two centuries: he had managed to prove the Poincaré conjecture.

In 2006 he was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal, but had voluntarily and expressly refused to accept it.
Most recently, he has been awarded the not less prestigious Clay Millenium Prize, but is expected to reject this award as well.

It makes me very happy when I see new precise results on the mass of the top quark being produced by the CDF collaboration (to which I still proudly belong). CDF, one of the two hadron collider experiments operating at the 2-TeV Tevatron proton-antiproton synchrotron in Batavia, IL, has been measuring the top quark mass since 1994, one year prior to its discovery. The figure with the top candidates (histogram) from which the mass measurement of 174+-12 GeV was obtained in 1994 is shown on the right below; backgrounds and top expectation are shown by hatched lines.