Optics

'Dinobird' Plumage Patterns Revealed By X-Rays

X-ray experiments have found chemical traces of the original 'dinobird' Archaeopteryx and dilute traces of plumage pigments in a 150 million-year-old fossil. Only 11 specimens of Archaeopteryx have been found, the first one consisting of a singl ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 13 2013 - 11:57am

Controlling Gene Expression Using Light

Of the estimated 20,000 genes humans have, only a fraction are turned on at any given time. It depends on the cell's needs, which can change by the minute or hour. Determining what those genes are doing means using tools that can manipulate their sta ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 23 2013 - 10:18am

Levitation: A Glowing, Nanoscale Diamond

Researchers have measured light emitted by photoluminescence from a nanodiamond levitating in free space.  Their paper describes how they used a laser to trap nanodiamonds in space, and – using another laser – caused the diamonds to emit light at given fr ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 12 2013 - 5:25pm

We Can Exceed The Speed Of Light- If We Slow Light To A Crawl

Light traveling in a vacuum is the ultimate speed demon, moving at about 700 million miles per hour. Matter cannot exceed the speed of light- unless, perhaps, there is a speed bump in light's path. Researchers from  France's Université de Nice-S ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 14 2013 - 7:30am

Astronomical Camera Resolution Makes Night Sky Images Sharper Than Ever Before

A new type of camera allows scientists to take sharper images of the night sky than ever before.  It combines a telescope with a large diameter primary mirror is being used for digital photography at its theoretical resolution limit in visible wavelengths ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 21 2013 - 4:02pm

Use Your Digital SLR Camera To Measure The Height Of Aurora Borealis

If you want to see Aurora Borealis (the northern lights) in 3-D with your SLR cameras, and even determine the altitude where electrons in the atmosphere emit the light that produces aurora,  Ryuho Kataoka from the National Institute of Polar Research in T ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 6 2013 - 2:15pm

Tabletop SLAC, Thanks To An 'Accelerator On A Chip'

Researchers recently used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice, an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and m ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 29 2013 - 7:00am

Move Over Electrons, Here Comes A Neutron Microscope

Researchers have developed a new concept for a microscope that would use neutrons,  subatomic particles with no electrical charge, to create high-resolution images instead of the more traditional beams of light or electrons. Among other benefits, neutron- ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 6 2013 - 7:00am

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