Small melanin particles cause skin cancer
The radiation causes the eumelanin to generate large quantities of free oxygen radicals, which in turn damage cell DNA and hence may lead to cancer. His research was reported yesterday at the annual A...
Spinach to fuel optoelectronics
Although they are only 5nm long, each complex can generate 1 V in picoseconds, making them suitable for ultrafast switching, logic devices, and solar-power generation. The work was presented this week...
Read article: Matter makes waves
Matter makes waves
Phillips and his colleagues produced a focused directional output from the Bose-Einstein condensate by firing two laser beams into the condensate. One beam adds energy to the atoms, while the second s...
Gravity-wave detectors target quantum gravity
Both the French-Italian gravity-wave interferometer, called VIRGO, and the LIGO interferometers in the US are designed to detect very weak gravity waves by using lasers to monitor test masses placed a...
Stochastic resonance tracked down
Vertical cavity lasers work by having a quantum well sandwiched between alternating layers of gallium arsenide (GaAs) and aluminium gallium arsenide (AlGaAs). As the two materials have different refra...
Green look for red fluorescent lights
The technique works because two different ions, gadolinium and europium, are in the phosphor material. The UV light boosts a gadolinium ion to its excited state. This excess energy is then transferred...
New look for optical fibres
Fibre-optic cables usually consist of an inner core of highly refractive glass sheathed inside glass with a lower refractive index. Light travels along the inner core fibre by total internal reflectio...
Microlasers get even smaller
Attempts to scale down current laser designs have been made before, but the devices were not efficient enough for real applications. Now a group of researchers from Darmstadt University of Technology,...
Achieving optical super resolution
When light hits an object, diffraction causes the beam to spread over an area that depends on the aperture of the lens. The phase filters make this area smaller but also cause a reduction in the beam ...
New clues to the left-handed origins of life
Fred Hoyle was the first to suggest that organic molecules developed in outer space and then fell to the earth, but it was not until the discovery of large quantities of left-handed amino acids in a m...
