Science

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Quantum reality more complex than previously thought

Imagine you order a delivery of several glass vases in different colors. Each vase is sent as a separate parcel. What would you think of the courier if the parcels arrive apparently undamaged, yet when you open them, it turns out that all the red vases are intact and all the green ones are smashed to pieces? Physicists from the University of Warsaw and the Gdansk University of Technology have demonstrated that when quantum information is transmitted, nature can be as whimsical as this crazy delivery man.

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Even an individual photon can travel along both arms of the interferometer at the same time. When it is unknown which path it is travelling along, we observe interference and the appearance of interference fringes. A strong signal is visible where the crests of light waves meet, and a weak signal is obtained at the meeting point of the troughs. If it is possible to determine which arm the photon travelled along, following leakage of information from the interferometer, the fringes disappear.

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Super-thin membranes clear the way for chip-sized pumps

The ability to shrink laboratory-scale processes to automated chip-sized systems would revolutionize biotechnology and medicine. For example, inexpensive and highly portable devices that process blood samples to detect biological agents such as anthrax are needed by the U.S. military and for homeland security efforts. One of the challenges of "lab-on-a-chip" technology is the need for miniaturized pumps to move solutions through micro-channels. Electroosmotic pumps (EOPs), devices in which fluids appear to magically move through porous media in the presence of an electric field, are ideal because they can be readily miniaturized. EOPs however, require bulky, external power sources, which defeats the concept of portability. But a super-thin silicon membrane developed at the University of Rochester could now make it possible to drastically shrink the power source, paving the way for diagnostic devices the size of a credit card.

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A microfluidic bioreactors consists of two chambers separated by a nanoporous silicon membrane. It allows for flow-based assays using minimal amounts of reagent. The ultra-thin silicon membrane provides an excellent mimic of biological barrier properties. NOTE: This image combines two exposures in order to capture the brighter and darker parts of the scene, which exceed the dynamic range of the camera sensor. The resulting composite is truer to what the eye actually sees.

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Scientists' new approach improves efficiency of solar cells

An international team of scientists, led by researchers from the Universities of York and St Andrews, has developed a new method to increase the efficiency of solar cells.

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A quasi-random structure to maximise performance of a thin film silicon solar cell.

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Earth from Space: Lands of change

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Lakes and mountains of western Uganda are captured in this Envisat radar image

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NASA's Great Observatories Begin Deepest Ever Probe of the Universe

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These (image above) are NASA Hubble Space Telescope natural-color images of four target galaxy clusters that are part of an ambitious new observing program called The Frontier Fields.

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ZEISS Microscopes used to create images for Art Exhibit at Midway Airport: Art of Science: Images from the Institute for Genomic Biology

An art exhibit at Chicago's Midway Airport features images created by using microscopy equipment by ZEISS. Researchers from the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) Core Facilities, affiliated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, used state-of-the-art microscopes for pioneering research to capture images that address significant problems facing humanity related to health, agriculture, energy and the environment.

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Nanoscale Engineering Boosts Performance of Quantum Dot Light Emitting Diodes: Making the light at the end of the tunnel more efficient

Dramatic advances in the field of quantum dot light emitting diodes (QD-LEDs) could come from recent work by the Nanotechnology and Advanced Spectroscopy team at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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The quantum dot device structure shown with a transmission electron microscopy (TEM) image of a cross-section of a real device.

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Cassini Gets New Views of Titan's Land of Lakes

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This false-color mosaic, made from infrared data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, reveals the differences in the composition of surface materials around hydrocarbon lakes at Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

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Hubble View of a Special Spiral Galaxy

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Researchers Advance Scheme to Design Seamless Integrated Circuits Etched on Graphene: UC Santa Barbara researchers demonstrate seamless designing of an atomically-thin circuit with transistors and interconnects etched on a monolayer of graphene

Researchers in electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara have introduced and modeled an integrated circuit design scheme in which transistors and interconnects are monolithically patterned seamlessly on a sheet of graphene, a 2-dimensional plane of carbon atoms. The demonstration offers possibilities for ultra energy-efficient, flexible, and transparent electronics.

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