New detector finds gamma rays from surprising cosmic sources

Astrophysicist Cao Zhen opens a steel hatch on a windswept Tibetan Plateau and climbs down a ladder into inky darkness. His flashlight picks out a boat floating on a pool of purified water above thousands of glittering orbs ...

Better integrated circuits with glide symmetry

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are highly localized surface waves on the interface between metal and dielectric in the optical frequency band. SPPs do not naturally exist in the microwave and terahertz frequencies, so ...

Sharks use Earth's magnetic fields to guide them like a map

Sea turtles are known for relying on magnetic signatures to find their way across thousands of miles to the very beaches where they hatched. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on May 6 have some of ...

Material scientists find new angle toward better heat transfer

UCLA materials scientists have developed a class of optical material that controls how heat radiation is directed from an object. Similar to the way overlapping blinds direct the angle of visible light coming through a window, ...

NIST demo adds key capability to atom-based radio communications

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and collaborators have demonstrated an atom-based sensor that can determine the direction of an incoming radio signal, another key part for a potential ...

Exploring the nanoworld in 3D

Imagine a cube on which light is projected by a flashlight. The cube reflects the light in a particular way, so simply spinning the cube or moving the flashlight makes it possible to examine each aspect and deduce information ...

New light on baryonic matter and gravity on cosmic scales

Scientists estimate that dark matter and dark energy together are some 95% of the gravitational material in the universe while the remaining 5% is baryonic matter, which is the "normal" matter composing stars, planets and ...

page 34 from 40