An international team of physicists that includes a Texas A&M University professor has announced discovery of a new spintronic effect in semiconductor chips, the intrinsic spin Hall effect, which puts a new twist on future technology and the possibility for novel circuits with low energy consumption.

The team is formed by physicists Dr. Jörg Wunderlich and Dr. Bernd Kaestner from the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, U.K.; Prof. Tomás Jungwirth from the Institute of Physics of the Aca

d3o lab was granted a government SMART award in 2003 and 2004 for the development of a high technology application. Since then they have been developing the technology in the laboratory and working with a diverse range of companies from medical to extreme sports to realise the material’s potential.

The material qualities of d3o are unlike any other material currently available and it has an endless list of possible uses as a result. Richard Palmer, Managing Director of d3o lab c

Whether dealing with high-power particle accelerators, astronomical observatories or Earth-watching spacecraft, modern science involves vast volumes of information, and researchers require powerful Grid computing techniques to manage this data deluge.

And at a time when the research teams working on the biggest scientific problems of our time – from climate modelling to molecular biology or high energy physics – are larger and more diffuse than ever before, Grid computing offe

Intermetallics could be the key to faster jets and more efficient car engines. But these heat-resistant, lightweight compounds have stumped scientists for decades. Why do so many break so easily? A team from Brown University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and UES Inc. used the world’s most powerful electron microscope to see, for the first time, atomic details that may provide the answer for the most common class of intermetallics. Their results – which could open the door for new materials fo

Ultrathin superconducting wires can withstand stronger magnetic fields than larger wires made from the same material, researchers now report. This finding may be useful for technologies that employ superconducting magnets, such as magnetic resonance imaging.

As described in the Jan. 14 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created high-quality superconducting wires with molecular dimensions, and measured

A pioneering new way of creating computer programs could be used in the future to design and build robots with minds that function like that of a human being, according to a leading researcher at The University of Reading.

Dr James Anderson, of the University’s Department of Computer Science, has developed for the first time the ‘perspective simplex’, or Perspex, which is a way of writing a computer program as a geometrical structure, rather than as a series of instructions.

The Hubble Space Telescope’s latest image of the star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) reveals dramatic changes in the illumination of surrounding dusty cloud structures. The effect, called a light echo, has been unveiling never-before-seen dust patterns ever since the star suddenly brightened for several weeks in early 2002.

The illumination of interstellar dust comes from the red supergiant star at the middle of the image, which gave off a pulse of light three years ago, somewhat sim

An important step has been taken on the way to building the world’s most powerful neutron source-ESS-European Spallation Source-in Scania, the southern Swedish province. To strengthen international contacts, not least with the business community, a collaborative group has been established, including members from the Nordic countries and several research financiers. The group will be called ESS Innovation Forum.

A European research facility like ESS would be a key tool in strategi

Nanotechnologies which can artificially change the optical properties of materials to allow light to be trapped in solar cells could greatly reduce the cost of solar energy.

Research being carried out by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton is focusing on nanopatterning as the way to design effective solar panels. ‘By drawing features that are much smaller than the wavelength of light, photons can be confused into doing things t

Atoms at the ends of self-assembled atomic chains act like anchors with lower energy levels than the “links” in the chain, according to new measurements by physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The first-ever proof of the formation of “end states” in atomic chains may help scientists design nanostructures, such as electrical wires made “from the atoms up,” with desired electrical properties.

The NIST experiments, described in the Feb. 4

Researchers at the Public University of Navarre are designing and developing a filter that enhances the power of communications satellites for the European Space Agency. The filter enables the reduction, by a factor of a million, interference produced by what is known as the “Field Emission Effect”.

The work developed by the Navarre researchers is in its final stages and its results have been satisfactory, given that the filter devised enables the reduction of interference produced

Physicists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered a neural circuit in rats that could provide a powerful model for understanding a neurological condition known as blepharospasm—uncontrolled eye blinking that affects 50,000 people in the U.S. and leaves some patients functionally blind.

In the February 3 issue of the journal Neuron, the researchers, Quoc-Thang Nguyen and David Kleinfeld, describe the brain circuit, which coordinates sensory inputs and muscle acti

NASATMs Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered two huge intergalactic clouds of diffuse hot gas. These clouds are the best evidence yet that a vast cosmic web of hot gas contains the long-sought missing matter – about half of the atoms and ions in the Universe.

Various measurements give a good estimate of the mass-density of the baryons – the neutrons and protons that make up the nuclei of atoms and ions – in the Universe 10 billion years ago. However, sometime during the las

Found: 7 percent of the mass of the universe. Missing since: 10 billion years ago.

Consider one more astronomical mystery solved. Scientists have located a sizeable chunk of the universe that seemed to be missing since back when the stars first formed. It’s floating in super-hot rivers of gas, invisible to the naked eye, surrounding galaxies like our own. And a completely different kind of mystery matter — dark matter — may have put it there. The results appear in the curren

Cardiff experts’ key role in space telescope mission

Experts at Cardiff University, UK, are designing and building highly sophisticated equipment, which will travel deep into space to enable scientists to look back in time to observe the formation of galaxies and stars. A team in the School of Physics and Astronomy is heading an international consortium, led by Cardiff’s Professor Matt Griffin, to produce SPIRE. This is a three-colour camera and spectrometer, which will b

The third telescope aboard NASA’s Swift gamma-ray observatory, the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) with key involvement from UK scientists at University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, has seen first light and is now poised to observe its first gamma-ray burst. The UVOT captured an image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, known by amateur astronomers as the ‘perfect’ face-on spiral galaxy. With the UVOT turned on the Swift observatory is fully operational. Swift’s two other instrume