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These are just a few of the items on the "Christmas tree" of possible applications for the beam pattern that Miguel Alonso, professor of optics, and Kevin Parker, the William F. May Professor of Engineering, describe in a recent paper in Optics Express.

HE0435-1223, located in the centre of this wide-field image, is among the five best lensed quasars discovered to date. The foreground galaxy creates four almost evenly distributed images of the distant quasar around it.

On the left, in vivo image of nanomachines using current microscopy techniques; on the right, the new method allows 3D observation of nanomachines in vivo and provides 25-fold improvement in resolution.

Mono Lake, California, with salt pillars known as "tufas" visible. JPL scientists tested new methods for detecting chemical signatures of life in the salty waters here, believing them to be analogs for water on Mars or ocean worlds like Europa.

January storms in the Sierra Nevadas reduced California's deficit in stored snow water by about 37 percent.

Schematic sketch of the spatio-temporal deviations from the level of bare vacuum fluctuations of the electric field which are generated by deforming space-time and sampled in the time domain. The color-coded hypersurface combines a longitudinal time trace (red line) with the transverse mode function.

To make high-performance devices however, good ohmic contacts with low electrical resistances are required to allow the maximum current to flow both ways between the electrode and the semiconductor layers. Recently, a team of scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has successfully developed conducting polymer films that can provide unprecedented ohmic contacts to give superior performance in plastic electronics, including organic light-emitting diodes, solar cells and transistors. The research findings have been recently published in the journal Nature.