Archive for June, 2008

Whoever penned the old adage “a watched pot never boils” surely never tried to heat up water in a pot lined with copper nanorods. A new study from researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that by adding an invisible layer of the nanomaterials to the bottom of a metal vessel, an order of magnitude less energy ...

It was going to be another long, hot day in the garage. The task of the day for Iowa State University’s solar car team was to glue the bottom half of its race car’s carbon fiber shell to the aluminum tubing of the car’s frame. To speed up the drying and curing, Matt Martin and Wade ...

Genetic studies on small organisms such as worms and flies can now be done more quickly using a new microfluidic device developed by engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The new “lab-on-a-chip” can automatically position, image, determine the phenotype of and sort small animals, such as the worm Caenorhabditis elegans that is commonly used for ...

The biggest black holes may feed just like the smallest ones, according to data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes. This discovery supports the implication of Einstein's relativity theory that black holes of all sizes have similar properties, and will be useful for predicting the properties of a conjectured new class of black ...

Using a convenient and flexible method for creating twin light beams, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have produced “quantum images,” pairs of information-rich visual patterns whose features are “entangled,” or inextricably linked by the laws of quantum ...