Crystals form the basis for the penetrating icy blue glare of car headlights - they could also be fundamental to the future in solar energy technology?

Manufactured alloy crystals, such as indium gallium nitride or InGaN, form the light emitting region of LEDs, for illumination in the visible range, and of laser diodes (LDs) in the blue-UV range.  

In an article recently published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, researchers revealed the fundamental aspect of a new approach to growing InGaN crystals for diodes, which promises to move photovoltaic solar cell technology toward record-breaking efficiencies.

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.

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.

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.

Less than two weeks in space may be enough to cause profound changes in eye structure and gene expression, according to a new report based on a small study.

The study looked at how low gravity and radiation and oxidative damage impacts mice and examines eye-related gene expression and cell behavior after spaceflight, but the subject size was too limited to be conclusive - 18 mice in nine different condition groups, due to limited aboard orbital missions. 

A new paper describes an acoustic remote bomb detection system that can identify homemade bombs and determine the difference between those that contain low-yield and high-yield explosives.

A number of different tools are currently used for explosives detection. These range from dogs and honeybees to mass spectrometry, gas chromatography and specially designed X-ray machines.

A common genetic variant, rs4143094, located on the same chromosome 10 region that includes GATA3, a transcription factor gene previously linked to several forms of cancer, is in about 36 percent of the population.  A study has linked it to an increased risk of colorectal cancer from the consumption of red meat and processed meat, according to a new study. The transcription factor encoded by this gene normally plays a role in the immune system