Seeing light in a new light: Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter

Sep. 25, 2013 — Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it. Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics…

Strength Of Gravity Shifts, And This Time It’s Serious!

The resulting value for G is 240 parts per million bigger than the official one, set in 2010. James Faller of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who tested G in 2010, is holding out for an error: "Errors are like violets in the springtime: they can spring up in any group's experiment," he says.…

Earth and others lose status as Goldilocks worlds

Bad news for Kepler-22b. Once deemed the most habitable world outside our solar system, it no longer looks life-friendly. More strangely, Earth's habitability rating has also taken a hit. Both results are thanks to a redefinition of the habitable zone – the region around a star in which liquid water can theoretically exist. Also known…

The World’s Tiniest Clock Is Made From Just One Atom

We've gotten pretty good at clocks. The nuclear clocks that exist right now are super accurate, so what more could you ask for? Something simpler. How about a clock that's just one, single atom? That's exactly what researchers just figured out how to make... Continue reading @ The World's Tiniest Clock Is Made From Just One…

Has Curiosity Made an ‘Earth-Shaking’ Discovery?

The Mars Science Laboratory team has hinted that they might have some big news to share soon. But like good scientists, they are waiting until they verify their results before saying anything definitive. In an interview on NPR today, MSL Principal Investigator John Grotzinger said a recent soil sample test in the SAM instrument Sample…

Bioengineers introduce Bi-Fi | The biological Internet

If you were a bacterium, the virus M13 might seem innocuous enough. It insinuates more than it invades, setting up shop like a freeloading houseguest, not a killer. Once inside it makes itself at home, eating your food, texting indiscriminately. Recently, however, bioengineers at Stanford University have given M13 a bit of a makeover. The…

Delivering drugs via nanoparticles to target mitochondria

Researchers at the University of Georgia have refined the nanoparticle drug delivery process further by using nanoparticles to deliver drugs to a specific organelle within cells. By targeting mitochondria, “the powerhouse of cells,” the researchers increased the effectiveness of mitochondria-acting therapeutics used to treat cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and obesity in studies conducted with cultured cells. “The…

Moving plane exchanges quantum keys with Earth

AN AEROPLANE has beamed quantum encryption keys to a station on the ground, paving the way for an ultra-secure global communications network. Quantum key distribution (QKD) uses photons polarised in two different ways to encode the 0s and 1s of an encryption key. The laws of quantum mechanics ensure the transmission is secure, as any…

Acupuncture Provides True Pain Relief in Study

A new study of acupuncture — the most rigorous and detailed analysis of the treatment to date — found that it can ease migraines and arthritis and other forms of chronic pain. The findings provide strong scientific support for an age-old therapy used by an estimated three million Americans each year. Though acupuncture has been…

Roll Over, Pythagoras: the “Holy Grail” of Math May Have Been Found

The so-called "holy grail" of mathematics may have just been found. Shinichi Mochizuki, a professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Kyoto University, released a 500-page proof of the abc conjecture in number theory which involves the relationship between prime numbers, which I will attempt to describe as succinctly as possible below. A lot of open theory…