Through the combining glass

Trying on clothes when a shop is closed could become a reality thanks to new research that uses semi-transparent mirrors in interactive systems and which will be unveiled at an international conference tomorrow.

The 'microbial garden' taking the shine off glaciers

The first ecological study of an entire glacier has found that microbes drastically reduce surface reflectivity and have a non-negligible impact on the amount of sunlight that is reflected into space.

Gravity waves and sunglint, lake superior

From the vantage point of the International Space Station, astronauts frequently observe atmospheric and surface phenomena in ways that are impossible to view from the ground. Two such phenomena—gravity waves and sunglint—are ...

New phenomenon could lead to novel types of lasers and sensors

There are several ways to "trap" a beam of light—usually with mirrors, other reflective surfaces, or high-tech materials such as photonic crystals. But now researchers at MIT have discovered a new method to trap light that ...

Image: Fires in the Yucatan Peninsula

Dozens of red hot spots cluster at the tip of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. To the south, fires also speckle the neck of the Yucatan, Guatemala, and Belize. Each hot spot, which appears as a red mark, is an area where the thermal ...

Fish skin structure explains biological cloaking

The highly effective optical means by which silvery fish, such as the European sardine and Atlantic herring, camouflage themselves from predators is explained this month in Nature Photonics.

Habitable zones

(PhysOrg.com) -- The "habitable zone" is the region around a star where a suitable planet could sustain the conditions necessary for life. Most astronomers take it to be the region where the balance between stellar radiation ...

Efficacy of cool roofs varies from city to city

(PhysOrg.com) -- While cool roofs and pavements have been found to cool the planet by preventing energy from being radiated back into the atmosphere, previous studies have not accounted for atmospheric feedbacks that may ...

page 3 from 4