/ en-us Â鶹ÒùÔº internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Â鶹ÒùÔºics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. When two mesh screens or fabrics are overlapped with a slight offset, moiré patterns emerge as a result of interference caused by the misalignment of the grids. While these patterns are commonly recognized as optical illusions in everyday life, their significance extends to the nanoscale, such as in materials like graphene, where they can profoundly influence electronic properties. /news/2025-08-customized-moir-patterns-stacked-metal.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:23:03 EDT news674317381 EPFL scientists have developed a new technique that lets researchers watch, with unprecedented sensitivity, how materials emit polarized light over time. /news/2025-07-imaging-technique-captures-polarized.html Condensed Matter Optics & Photonics Wed, 02 Jul 2025 09:13:10 EDT news670666387 Scientists have long known that light can sometimes appear to exit a material before entering it—an effect dismissed as an illusion caused by how waves are distorted by matter. /news/2024-12-scientists-negative-quantum.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Sat, 21 Dec 2024 07:23:37 EST news653988167 Acoustic camouflage, realized by controlling wave propagation, has attracted much attention in recent years. Aided by a reflecting surface, acoustic carpet cloak has become one of the most practically feasible invisibility devices. /news/2022-07-acoustics-underwater-carpet-cloak.html Soft Matter Thu, 28 Jul 2022 09:24:50 EDT news578219088 Researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new photonic device that could get scientists closer to the "holy grail" of finding the global minimum of mathematical formulations at room temperature. Finding that illusive mathematical value would be a major advancement in opening new options for simulations involving quantum materials. /news/2022-06-device-scientists-closer-quantum-materials.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Fri, 17 Jun 2022 10:28:04 EDT news574680482 In recent years, physicists have discovered materials that are able to switch their electrical character from a metal to an insulator, and even to a superconductor, which is a material in a friction-free state that allows electrons to flow with zero resistance. These materials, which include "magic-angle" graphene and other synthesized two-dimensional materials, can shift electrical states depending on the voltage, or current of electrons, that is applied. /news/2022-03-physicists-evidence-strong-electron-2d.html Superconductivity Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 17 Mar 2022 15:46:15 EDT news566750769 Whether chatting with friends at a dinner party or managing a high-stakes meeting at work, communicating with others in a group requires a complex set of mental tasks. Our brains must track who is speaking and what is being said, as well as what our relationship to that person may be—because, after all, we probably give the opinion of our best friend more weight than that of a complete stranger. /news/2021-10-reveals-secrets-social-brain.html Plants & Animals Evolution Thu, 21 Oct 2021 17:00:04 EDT news554054398 For much of human history, animals and plants were perceived to follow a different set of rules than the rest of the universe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this culminated in a belief that living organisms were infused by a non-physical energy or "life force" that allowed them to perform remarkable transformations that couldn't be explained by conventional chemistry or physics alone. /news/2021-07-tool-drastically-enzymes.html Molecular & Computational biology Thu, 22 Jul 2021 15:13:48 EDT news546185545 Entering an invisible doorway to catch a train at King's Cross station in London is a renowned fictional scene from the Harry Potter series. In recent decades, physicists have been trying to produce a similar effect by focusing their research efforts on illusion devices. /news/2021-06-superscattering-effect-metamaterials.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Condensed Matter Wed, 23 Jun 2021 09:30:02 EDT news543486605 Despite years of hype, virtual reality headsets have yet to topple TV or computer screens as the go-to devices for video viewing. One reason: VR can make users feel sick. Nausea and eye strain can result because VR creates an illusion of 3D viewing although the user is in fact staring at a fixed-distance 2D display. The solution for better 3D visualization could lie in a 60-year-old technology remade for the digital world: holograms. /news/2021-03-artificial-intelligence-3d-holograms-real-time.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Optics & Photonics Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:00:05 EST news534583647 Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. They demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair, small enough to be placed on computer chips. /news/2021-02-unbound-limits-optical-antennas.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 25 Feb 2021 12:06:28 EST news533477183 Raising kids can be tough, and sometimes you need all the help you can get. Biologists at the University of Bristol argue that some animals might be able to blackmail reluctant relatives into assisting with the rearing of young. The study is published today [2 February] in The American Naturalist. /news/2021-02-blackmail-family.html Plants & Animals Evolution Tue, 02 Feb 2021 12:58:14 EST news531493091 Holographic movies, like the one R2D2 projected of Princess Leia in "Star Wars: A New Hope," have long been the province of science fiction, but for most of us, the extent of our experience with holograms may be the dime-sized stamps on our passports and credit cards. By using 'metasurface' materials that can manipulate light in ways that natural materials cannot, researchers reckon they have finally seen the light at the end of the tunnel for creating true holographic movies. /news/2020-08-true-holographic-movies-grasp.html Optics & Photonics Mon, 31 Aug 2020 12:40:36 EDT news518096431 Graphene, an extremely thin two-dimensional layer of the graphite used in pencils, buckles when cooled while attached to a flat surface, resulting in beautiful pucker patterns that could benefit the search for novel quantum materials and superconductors, according to Rutgers-led research in the journal Nature. /news/2020-08-quantum-materials-quest-benefit-graphene.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Wed, 12 Aug 2020 11:00:09 EDT news516432558 A breakthrough in fertility science by researchers from Bristol and Mexico has shattered the universally accepted view of how sperm 'swim'. /news/2020-07-human-sperm-centuries-old-assumption.html Cell & Microbiology Molecular & Computational biology Fri, 31 Jul 2020 14:00:03 EDT news515384175 Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill made a one-way street for electrons that may unlock the ability for devices to process ultra-high-speed wireless data and simultaneously harvest energy for power. The researchers did this by shaping silicon on a microscopic scale to create a funnel, or "ratchet," for electrons. /news/2020-04-one-way-street-electrons.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 09 Apr 2020 14:00:06 EDT news505643488 Researchers have created a unique device which will unlock the elusive terahertz wavelengths and make revolutionary new technologies possible. /news/2020-02-graphene-amplifier-hidden-frequencies-electromagnetic.html Nanophysics Mon, 03 Feb 2020 09:46:38 EST news499945591 Materials scientists aim to engineer intelligence into the fabric of materials or metamaterials for programmable functions. Engineering efforts can vary from passive to active forms to develop programmable metasurfaces using dynamic and arbitrary electromagnetic (EM) wavefields. Such metasurfaces, however, require manual control to switch between functions. In a new study now published on Light: Science & Applications, Qian Ma and an interdisciplinary research team in the State Key Laboratory, Cyberspace Science and Technology, and the Department of Electronics in China engineered a smart metasurface for self-adaptive programmability. /news/2019-11-smart-metamaterials-reprogram.html Optics & Photonics Mon, 11 Nov 2019 09:30:03 EST news492681095 Camera performance on mobile devices has proven to be one of the features that most end-users aim for. The importance of optical image quality improvement, and the trend to have thinner and thinner smartphones have pushed manufactures to increase the number of cameras in order to provide phones with better zoom, low-light exposure high quality photography, and portrait settings, to name a few. But adding additional lenses to a miniaturized optical configuration and driving light focusing with an electronic device is not as easy as it seems, particularly at small scales or in confined spaces. /news/2019-07-smartlens.html Optics & Photonics Fri, 26 Jul 2019 11:29:41 EDT news483359369 The ability to hide an arbitrary object with a cloak at a distance from the object is a unique task in photonics research, although the phenomenon is yet to be realized in practice. In a recent study now published in Light: Science & Applications, Tianhang Chen and co-workers at the Key laboratory of Micro-Nano Electronics and Smart Systems, and the State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation in China proposed the first experimental realization of a remote cloaking device. The device can make any object located at a specific distance invisible using a direct current (DC) frequency. /news/2019-03-current-dc-remote-cloak-arbitrary.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 27 Mar 2019 09:30:03 EDT news472894146 Metasurfaces are two-dimensional (2-D) metamaterials that can control scattering waves of a light beam. Their applications include thin-sheet polarizers, beam splitters, beam steerers and lenses. These structures can control and transform impinging waves based on the generalized reflection and refraction law (GSL; generalized Snell's law and generalized reflection law), which states that small phase-shifting elements can control the directions of the reflected and transmitted waves. /news/2019-02-power-flow-conformal-metamirrors.html Optics & Photonics Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:30:02 EST news470041558 Lasers are widely used in household appliances, medicine, industry, telecommunications and more. Several years ago, scientists introduced nanolasers. Their design is similar to that of the conventional semiconductor lasers based on heterostructures in common use for several decades. The difference is that the cavities of nanolasers are exceedingly small, on the order of the wavelength of the light they emit. Since they mostly generate visible and infrared light, the size is on the order of one millionth of a meter. /news/2019-02-physicists-big-nanolaser.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 07 Feb 2019 08:30:02 EST news468750101 To enable negative refraction and related optical illusions, metamaterials are artificially engineered with unique properties that result from their internal physical structures, rather than their chemical composition. The concept is credited to an experiment conducted by the Soviet scientist Victor Veselago in 1968 to show that negatively refracting materials (as opposed to the typically observed positive refractive index) to create a negative index 'superlens' could be achieved when both electric permittivity (ε) and magnetic permeability (µ) of a material were negative. Thirty-three years after the conceptual proposal, the pioneering work of physicist John Pendry enabled the development of metamaterials as Veselago imagined—a composite material with negative refractive index providing greatly improved resolution. /news/2018-08-programmable-guidance-current-fields-laplacian.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 29 Aug 2018 09:40:01 EDT news454668008 Each night, dramatic aerial battles are waged above our heads, complete with barrel rolls, razor-sharp turns, sonar jamming, cloaking devices and life-or-death consequences. /news/2018-07-anti-bat-signal-moths-larger-hindwings-longer.html Plants & Animals Wed, 04 Jul 2018 14:00:04 EDT news449907589 Tomorrow's digital interface may be even more revolutionary than the pinching, tapping and scrolling heralded by the smartphone: voice commands promise to unify and tame our digital lives. /news/2017-09-voice-light-fingered-future.html Consumer & Gadgets Mon, 04 Sep 2017 10:15:52 EDT news423738945 A collaboration between biologists and materials scientists at the University of Pennsylvania is yielding new insights into the wings of the "skipper butterfly" in the Costa Rican rainforest. What they learn could lead to technological advancements in systems ranging from power-efficient computer displays to sensors to energy efficient buildings, windows and vehicles. /news/2017-06-collaboration-insights-properties-butterfly-wings.html Plants & Animals Thu, 29 Jun 2017 11:03:03 EDT news417952973 An Australian-Chinese research team has created the world's thinnest hologram, paving the way towards the integration of 3D holography into everyday electronics like smart phones, computers and TVs. /news/2017-05-world-thinnest-hologram-paves-path.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 18 May 2017 05:00:03 EDT news414290480 A smartphone display that can produce 3-D images will need to be able to twist the light it emits. Now, researchers at the University of Michigan and the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have discovered a way to mass-produce spiral semiconductors that can do just that. /news/2017-03-semiconductors-d.html Materials Science Wed, 22 Mar 2017 07:41:36 EDT news409387283 Convertible video displays that offer both 2D and 3D imaging without the need of any eyewear offer greater convenience to users who would otherwise have to keep track of yet another accessory. Such autostereoscopic displays have already hit the TV market, but the underlying technology reveals its limitations at close viewing distances. Viewers typically must view these displays from a distance of around one meter (about three feet), eliminating any practical applicability to the smaller screens of mobile devices. /news/2016-10-eyewear-free-3d-capabilities-small-screen.html Optics & Photonics Mon, 31 Oct 2016 12:16:42 EDT news397134995 Virtual reality has arrived for real at the Tokyo Game Show, one of the world's biggest exhibitions for the latest in fun and games. /news/2016-09-vr-tokyo-game-revive-industry.html Consumer & Gadgets Thu, 15 Sep 2016 03:42:41 EDT news393129750