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A researcher prepares to use a laser scanning (lidar) unit to scan snow depth at the Arapahoe Ski Basin Ski area in Keystone, Colorado.

The graph above shows daily Arctic sea ice extent as of December 5, 2016, along with daily ice extent data for four previous years. 2016 is shown in blue, 2015 in green, 2014 in orange, 2013 in brown, and 2012 in purple. The 1981 to 2010 average is in dark gray. The gray area around the average line shows the two standard deviation range of the data. Sea Ice Index data. High-resolution image.

Drawing attention to the impact that climate change is having on smallholder farmers and rural communities in developing countries, British artists Adam and Silas Birtwistle unveiled four giant heads – Voices from the Good Earth - sculpted from fruit and vegetables at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Summit (CBD COP13) in Cancun, Mexico.

But look closely at the moment that light meets matter, and there's more to be discovered. Scientists at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore have just shown that a photon's shape also affects how it is absorbed by a single atom.

"The problem with most drug-delivery systems is that you have a specific minimum dosage of medicine that you need to take for it to be effective," Hood said. "There's also a limit to how much of the drug can be present in your system so that it doesn't make you sick."

The new device uses laser generated terahertz radiation instead of the usual radio-frequency fields to accelerate electrons from rest. As the wavelength of the terahertz radiation is much shorter than radio-frequency radiation, the device can shrink substantially. While state-of-the-art electron guns can have the size of a car, the new device measures just 34 by 24.5 by 16.8 millimetres.

Single wall carbon nanotubes are one of the most effective conductive additives – they are able to significantly increase electrical and thermal conductivity, and to improve the mechanical properties and other important characteristics of materials. However, their key advantage is that these desired properties can be achieved with ultralow loadings of the additive – hundreds or thousands of times lower than other widely used conductive additives, and starting from concentrations of just 0.01%. OCSiAl’s huge share of this market is a direct result of the unique technology it has developed that allows it to produce high-quality single wall carbon nanotubes, under the TUBALL™ brand, on an industrial scale, and at a price 75 times lower than that of the nearest analogues. The company has also developed super-concentrates that simplify the introduction of nanotubes into materials and do not require changes in production processes.

The brightest area on Ceres stands out amid shadowy, cratered terrain in a dramatic new view from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, taken as it looked off to the side of the dwarf planet. Dawn snapped this image on Oct. 16, from its fifth science orbit, in which the angle of the sun was different from that in previous orbits. Dawn was about 920 miles (1,480 kilometers) above Ceres when this image was taken -- an altitude the spacecraft had reached in early October.