/ 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. Researchers in McGill's Department of Mechanical Engineering have discovered a safe and low-cost method of engineering living materials such as tissues, organs and blood clots. By simply vibrating these materials as they form, scientists can dramatically influence how strong or weak they become. /news/2025-08-safe-scalable-vibration-technique-lab.html Cell & Microbiology Biotechnology Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:50:06 EDT news675355266 Liquids can provide some especially tricky challenges for space travelers, but new research from the University of Mississippi could help engineer smarter, more efficient fluid control in zero- and low-gravity environments. /news/2025-08-tiny-big-impact-fluid-space.html Soft Matter Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:40:01 EDT news675351028 There has long been a mystery when calculating how an incoming light wave scatters off an object and becomes a modified, outgoing light wave. In particular, the time delay of the transition from one to the other comes out to be a complex number, a regular real number but with a nonzero imaginary part. /news/2025-08-previously-mysterious-imaginary-component.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Optics & Photonics Fri, 22 Aug 2025 09:41:21 EDT news675074471 Scientists have long speculated that polaritons—hybrids of light and matter—could be harnessed to control photochemistry. Now, researchers at the City University of New York (CUNY) have shown that these fleeting states can indeed drive a fundamental type of molecular reaction. /news/2025-08-scientists-harness-polaritons-molecular.html Nanophysics Thu, 21 Aug 2025 15:22:43 EDT news675008559 Holography—the science of recording and reconstructing light fields—has long been central to imaging, data storage, and encryption. Traditional holographic systems, however, rely on bulky optical setups and interference experiments, making them impractical for compact or integrated devices. Computational methods such as the Gerchberg–Saxton (GS) algorithm have simplified hologram design by eliminating the need for physical interference patterns, but these approaches typically produce scalar holograms with uniform polarization, limiting the amount of information that can be encoded. /news/2025-08-ultrathin-metasurface-enables-high-efficiency.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:53:07 EDT news674999577 For years, engineers have sought better ways to build tiny, efficient lasers that can be integrated directly onto silicon chips, a key step toward faster, more capable optical communications and computing. /news/2025-08-simple-additive-method-perovskite-laser.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:22:03 EDT news674925721 Optical frequency combs are specially designed lasers that act like rulers to accurately and rapidly measure specific frequencies of light. They can be used to detect and identify chemicals and pollutants with extremely high precision. /news/2025-08-ultrabroadband-laser-enable-rapid-identification.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 20 Aug 2025 14:17:04 EDT news674918221 Solitonic waves—waves that keep their shape and direction of motion for a long time—have intrigued physicists for almost two centuries. In real-world circumstances, these waves eventually die out due to energy loss. A team of UvA physicists have now discovered how a particular type of interaction can be used to create very stable solitons, even in circumstances where energy is not conserved. /news/2025-08-physicists-stable-solitons-energy.html Condensed Matter Tue, 19 Aug 2025 10:33:04 EDT news674818381 A team of international researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Johns Hopkins University and Duke University has discovered that a century-old theory describing turbulence in fluids also applies to a very bubbly problem: how rising bubbles stir the water around them. /news/2025-08-elegant-theory-chaos.html Soft Matter Mon, 18 Aug 2025 09:47:13 EDT news674729219 Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a method to more precisely heat up gold nanoparticles to target and destroy cancerous tumors. Using imaging methods that combine light and sound to peer deeper into tissue, the team was better able to track and heat up nanoparticles to destroy a bladder cancer tumor in an animal model. The research is published in the journal Science Advances. /news/2025-08-based-thermometer-gold-nanoparticles-destroy.html Bio & Medicine Mon, 18 Aug 2025 09:09:19 EDT news674726954 Researchers at Rice University and collaborating institutions have discovered direct evidence of active flat electronic bands in a kagome superconductor. This breakthrough could pave the way for new methods to design quantum materials—including superconductors, topological insulators and spin-based electronics—that could power future electronics and computing technologies. /news/2025-08-scientists-quantum-behavior-unusual-superconducting.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Sat, 16 Aug 2025 03:16:23 EDT news674532955 Researchers at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge have demonstrated a new way to control radiation in the terahertz range—an often-overlooked part of the electromagnetic spectrum—with unprecedented dynamic range and speed. The findings could open the door to advanced technologies in communications, imaging, and sensing and mark major progress in the development of practical devices that operate in the terahertz range. /news/2025-08-graphene-capacitors-rapid-high-depth.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Fri, 15 Aug 2025 03:00:01 EDT news674445047 An international team of scientists led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed a new type of ultracompact laser that is more energy efficient and consumes less power. /news/2025-08-energy-efficient-ultracompact-laser-loss.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:34:04 EDT news674390042 While conventional computers store information in the form of bits, fundamental pieces of logic that take a value of either 0 or 1, quantum computers are based on qubits. These can have a state that is simultaneously both 0 and 1. This odd property, a quirk of quantum physics known as superposition, lies at the heart of quantum computing's promise to ultimately solve problems that are intractable for classical computers. /news/2025-08-quantum-longer.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:59:56 EDT news674308789 Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have helped develop an advanced, real-time tsunami forecasting system—powered by El Capitan, the world's fastest supercomputer—that could dramatically improve early warning capabilities for coastal communities near earthquake zones. /news/2025-08-scientists-explore-real-tsunami-world.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:28:04 EDT news674224081 Just as overlapping ripples on a pond can amplify or cancel each other out, waves of many kinds—including light, sound and atomic vibrations—can interfere with one another. At the quantum level, this kind of interference powers high-precision sensors and could be harnessed for quantum computing. /news/2025-08-powerful-quantum-paves-phonon-based.html Condensed Matter Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Mon, 11 Aug 2025 14:39:04 EDT news674141941 Sliding ferroelectrics are a type of two-dimensional (2D) material realized by stacking nonpolar monolayers (atom-thick layers that lack an electric dipole). When these individual layers are stacked, they produce ferroelectric materials with an intrinsic polarization (i.e., in which positive and negative charges are spontaneously separated), which can be switched using an external electric field that is perpendicular to them. /news/2025-08-domain-walls-polarization-ferroelectrics.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Mon, 11 Aug 2025 13:10:01 EDT news674133369 On New Year's Day 1995, a monstrous 80-foot wave in the North Sea slammed into the Draupner oil platform. The wall of water crumpled steel railings and flung heavy equipment across the deck—but its biggest impact was what it left behind: hard data. It was the first time a rogue wave had ever been measured in the open ocean. /news/2025-08-rogue-demystified-giant-seas-ocean.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 07 Aug 2025 12:39:12 EDT news673789147 Hydrogels are a permeable soft material consisting of polymer networks and water with applications ranging from biomedical engineering to contact lenses. Intrinsic to hydrogels is the ability to endow diverse characteristics by modifying their polymer networks. /news/2025-08-immovable-rubber-ducks-highest-underwater.html Polymers Materials Science Wed, 06 Aug 2025 11:00:09 EDT news673602721 A UNSW-led global collaborative study has found most shoreline prediction models are effective at forecasting changes to natural, sandy beaches with an accuracy of approximately 10 meters. /news/2025-08-global-benchmarking-competition-shoreline-ready.html Earth Sciences Environment Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:14:05 EDT news673524842 Light can behave in very unexpected ways when you squeeze it into small spaces. In a paper in the journal Science, Mark Brongersma, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University, and doctoral candidate Skyler Selvin describe the novel way they have used sound to manipulate light that has been confined to gaps only a few nanometers across—allowing the researchers exquisite control over the color and intensity of light mechanically. /news/2025-07-nanodevice-sculpt-paving-displays-imaging.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:00:05 EDT news673170541 An interdisciplinary team of McGill researchers has developed an ultra-strong, environmentally friendly medical glue, or bioadhesive, made from marine waste. The discovery has promising applications for wound care, surgeries, improved drug delivery, wearable devices and medical implants. /news/2025-07-naturally-sourced-nanowhisker-ultrasound-resilient.html Bio & Medicine Nanomaterials Thu, 31 Jul 2025 10:16:03 EDT news673175761 Using 3D holograms polished by artificial intelligence, researchers introduce a lean, eyeglass-like 3D headset that they say is a significant step toward passing the "Visual Turing Test." /news/2025-07-3d-headset-holograms-ai-lifelike.html Optics & Photonics Mon, 28 Jul 2025 10:44:08 EDT news672918242 Refraction—the bending of light as it passes through different media—has long been constrained by physical laws that prevent independent control over how light waves along different directions bend. Now, UCLA researchers have developed a new class of passive materials that can be structurally engineered to "program" refraction, enabling arbitrary control over the bending of light waves. /news/2025-07-ai-3d-materials-enable-custom.html Optics & Photonics Mon, 28 Jul 2025 10:20:02 EDT news672916543 A new artificial intelligence model can improve the process of drug and vaccine discovery by predicting how efficiently specific mRNA sequences will produce proteins, both generally and in various cell types. /news/2025-07-ai-tool-mrna-based-treatments.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:10:04 EDT news672656444 The Dead Sea is a confluence of extraordinary conditions: the lowest point on Earth's land surface, with one of the world's highest salinities. The high concentration of salt gives it a correspondingly high density, and the water body's status as the deepest hypersaline lake gives rise to interesting and often temperature-related phenomena below the water's surface that researchers are still uncovering. /news/2025-07-dead-sea-salt-giants-reveal.html Earth Sciences Sat, 19 Jul 2025 07:40:01 EDT news672129250 A rather unassuming particle is playing an important role in the hunt for subatomic oddities. Similar to protons and neutrons, mesons are composed of quarks bound together by the strong nuclear force. But these short-lived particles have different characteristics that can reveal new information about the atomic nucleus and how the universe works. /news/2025-07-standard-candle-particle-enables-hybrid.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Fri, 18 Jul 2025 08:50:58 EDT news672047444 In the race to develop faster and more flexible wireless communication technologies, researchers are turning to an unexpected source: the same organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) found in smartphone screens and TVs. /news/2025-07-oleds-faster-longer-distance-wireless.html Optics & Photonics Fri, 18 Jul 2025 07:50:02 EDT news672043263 The landslide that occurred in Blatten in the canton of Valais at the end of May 2025 and the one in the village of Brienz in Graubünden in June 2023 remind us of the potential for landslide hazards in the Alps. Debris flows are one such hazard. These flows of water, sediment and rock fragments typically occur after heavy rainfall in steep terrain, and rapidly travel down a channel, potentially destroying everything in their path. /news/2025-07-previously-unexplained-factors-destructive-debris.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 16 Jul 2025 09:44:40 EDT news671877874 Bubbles burst when their caps rupture. Children discover this phenomenon every summer day, but it also underpins key mechanisms for the spread of pollutants, contaminants, and even infectious disease through the generation of aerosol droplets. While bubble bursting has been extensively studied in pure substances, the impact of contaminants on bursting dynamics has not received widespread attention. /news/2025-07-theory-aerosol-droplets-contaminated-pollution.html Soft Matter Tue, 15 Jul 2025 03:32:04 EDT news671769119