Physical Sciences
A Sandia engineer who trained U.S. soldiers to avoid improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has developed a fertilizer that helps plants grow but can’t detonate a bomb. It’s an alternative to ammonium nitrate, an agricultural staple that is also the raw ingredient in most of the IEDs in Afghanistan.
| 5 min read
A new model gives scientists guidelines to develop ‘smart’ composite materials with wrinkled microstructures.
| 3 min read
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) have found a new mechanism to transmit light through optical fibers. Their discovery marks the first practical application of a Nobel-Prize-winning phenomenon that was proposed in 1958.
| 2 min read
White House supported initiative to speed up transition time from lab to marketplace.
| 3 min read
Quantum computers promise to perform certain types of operations much more quickly than conventional digital computers. But many challenges must be addressed before these ultra-fast machines become available, among them, the loss of order in the systems – a problem known as quantum decoherence – which worsens as the number of bits in a quantum computer increases.
| 4 min read
The same material that formed the first primitive transistors more than 60 years ago can be modified in a new way to advance future electronics, according to a new study.
| 4 min read
Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed and successfully demonstrated a photonic Floquet topological insulator, a new device used to protect the transport of light through a unique, lattice of 'waveguides.'
| 3 min read
It won’t be long before the NOvA experiment sends neutrinos on a 500-mile journey from northeast Illinois to northern Minnesota.
| 3 min read
Tiny filaments and cylinders are studied for possible uses in energy, electronics, optics and other fields.
| 3 min read
Controlling the shapes of nanometer-sized catalytic and electrocatalytic particles made from noble metals such as platinum and palladium may be more complicated than previously thought.
| 4 min read
WITec appoints the winners of the PaperAward 2013: Research groups from France, Germany, and Spain are among the winners. For WITec PaperAward 2013, 54 publications, published between January and December 2012, were submitted to this year’s competition. Due to the number of high-quality papers, the PaperAward jury decided to recognize three winning papers in gold, silver, and bronze.
| 2 min read
Talk about storing data in the cloud. Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have taken this to a whole new level by demonstrating that they can store visual images within quite an ethereal memory device—a thin vapor of rubidium atoms.
| 2 min read
