Science | WPN World People News

Quantum superposition is a fundamental and also intriguing property of the quantum world. Because of superposition, a quantum system can be in two different states simultaneously, like a cat that can be both "dead" and "alive" at the same time. However, this anti-intuitive phenomenon cannot be observed directly, because whenever a classical measuring tool touches a quantum system, it immediately collapse into a classical state. On the other hand, quantum superposition is also the core of quantum computer's enormous computational power. A quantum computer can easily break the widely used RSA (Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) security system with Shor's algorithm. But for now, quantum computation still suffers from the decoherence induced by environment. Obviously, the key to manipulate a quantum system is to make it stay coherent as long as possible, to achieve this, one need to isolate the system from its environment. "For ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems", Serge Haroche and David Wineland won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Changes at the atom level in nanowires offer vast possibilities for improvement of solar cells and LED light. NTNU-researchers have discovered that by tuning a small strain on single nanowires they can become more effective in LEDs and solar cells.

Iranian researchers from Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, in association with researchers from Veterinary Medicine, Razi University of Kermanshah, studied the effects of the use of carbon nanotubes on pregnant mothers.

Symmetry is ubiquitous in the natural world. It occurs in gemstones and snowflakes and even in biology, an area typically associated with complexity and diversity. There are striking examples: the shapes of virus particles, such as those causing the common cold, are highly symmetrical and look like tiny footballs.

Scientists in Singapore have successfully designed and fabricated electrical circuits that can operate at hundreds of terahertz frequencies, which is tens of thousands times faster than today's state-of-the-art microprocessors. This scientific breakthrough has the potential to revolutionise high-speed electronics, nanoscale opto-electronics and nonlinear optics.