SFGate.com: Micosoft has launch a competitor to google sky, the popular software program that lets computer users fly through the universe, viewing stars, planets and celestial bodies. The new product is called Worldwide Telescope. The virtual service combines images and databases from every major telescope and astronomical organization in the world. Microsoft says it is providing the resource for free in memory of Jim Gray, the Microsoft researcher who disappeared last year while sailing his boat to the Farallon Islands on a trip to scatter his mother's ashes. The project is an extension of Gray's work. "I never imagined (the telescope) would be so beautiful," said Alexander Szalay, an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University who worked with Gray on astronomy projects for more than a decade. Gray was an expert in databases, and he came to be accepted as "a card-carrying member" of the astronomical community for his work in bringing astronomical data online, Szalay said. A special version of the product is being developed for astronomers, and it's being considered as one way to visualize data in the Virtual Observatory, a project by the National Science Foundation to integrate all astronomical data online.
Related news pickGoogle launches virtual observatory
Nature: At the heart of any scientific explanation of music is an understanding of how and why it affects us. In the first of a nine-part essay series, Philip Ball explores just how far we can hope to achieve a full scientific theory of music
Science: Last October, the American TV network CBS premiered the now popular sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. Centering on two male physics postdocs and the blonde girl who moves in next door, The Big Bang Theory follows the sitcom formula of placing quirky, exaggerated characters in situations both odd and mundane.
The Big Bang Theory is the first time a prime-time comedy has taken science this seriously--partly in thanks to experimental particle physicist David Saltzberg of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Freelancer Karen Heyman recently spoke with Saltzberg and one of the show's creators Bill Prady for Science magazine, and paid a visit to the set of The Big Bang Theory, to learn how cutting-edge research gets injected into the show.
Christian Science Monitor: Unlike most of MIT, Amy Smith's workshop is far from cutting-edge. There are no next-gen computers, no vials of polysyllabic chemicals, no fancy equipment. The space is decidedly low-tech – and that's the point. D-Lab students pinpoint practical problems in the developing countries and then brainstorm and build solutions. Because the people they are trying to help are below the poverty line, the class's inventions must be simple, effective, and most important, inexpensive. "What people need is usually completely different from what we imagine sitting here in America," says Jodie Wu, a mechanical engineering junior, whose group went on a school-sponsored trip to Tanzania over winter break. The D in D-Lab stands for three things – development, design, and dissemination – and each is the theme of a different semester-long class.
Physics Today: The European Space Agency has released images of Cyclone Nargis making its way across the Bay of Bengal just south of Myanmar on 1 May 2008.
 The cyclone hit the coastal region and ripped through the heart of Myanmar on Saturday, devastating the country. The picture (right) is from the Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument working in Reduced Resolution mode to deliver a spatial resolution of 1200 meters.
Under an international charter founded by ESA, the French space agency (CNES) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) eight years ago, the agencies provide satellite data free of charge to those affected by disasters anywhere in the world. On 4 May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) asked for support.
With inundated areas typically visible from space, Earth Observation (EO) is increasingly being used for flood response and mitigation. One of the biggest problems during flooding emergencies is obtaining an overall view of the phenomenon, with a clear idea of the extent of the flooded area.
These Envisat radar images above highlight the extent of flooding in the Irrawaddy delta caused by the cyclone Nargis that hit Myanmar on May 3, 2008, devastating the country. The left image, acquired on Feb. 5, 2007, shows the situation approximately one year ago. The black and dark areas in the image on the right, acquired on May 5, 2008, indicate areas potentially still flooded two days after the event. Envisat's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar data are especially well suited for delivering information on floods, which are usually accompanied by rain and therefore cloudy conditions. Radar sensors can peer through clouds, rain or local darkness and are especially sensitive to moisture on the ground. Both images have a 75 m pixel grid on the ground and show an area approximately 100 km wide.
New York Times: Daphne Koller, a researcher at Stanford whose work has led to advances in artificial intelligence, sees the world as a web of probabilities. A mathematical theoretician, she has made contributions in areas like robotics and biology. Her biggest accomplishment — and at age 39, she is expected to make more — is creating a set of computational tools for artificial intelligence that can be used by scientists and engineers to do things like predict traffic jams, improve machine vision and understand the way cancer spreads.
Science: Laser technology is present in our daily lives through literally thousands of applications, including surgical instruments, CD and DVD players, optical fiber communications, and even supermarket barcode readers. Despite the fast pace of laser research, the design of most laser devices relies on assumptions in the underlying theory that have barely changed since the early days of laser theory (1). However, this situation is problematic for two reasons. First, the rapid advance of nanofabrication techniques has led to the development of completely new lasing systems whose description falls outside the scope of conventional laser theory. Of these, random lasers (2) are perhaps the most challenging example. Second, more general models could enable the design of substantially different classes of lasers. With their contribution in this week's Science magazine, Türeci, Rotter and Stone have substantially changed this picture. By developing a new theory in which the main properties of a laser can be physically understood as the result of strong nonlinear interactions between lasing modes, they have provided a substantially broader perspective of laser physics that unifies the physical description of many possible laser structures.
Related Article
Strong Interactions in Multimode Random Lasers Science 2 May 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5876, pp. 643 - 646
Mother Jones: The search for the perfect battery is fraught with obstacles—namely the laws of physics.
Los Angeles Times: The technique of painting in oils was developed in Asia as long as 800 years before it appeared in Europe, according to a new report in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectroscopy. The research is based on an analysis of murals found inside caves at Bamian in Afghanistan.
"This is the earliest clear example of oil paintings in the world," said Yoko Taniguchi, a historian at Tokyo's National Research Institute for Cultural Properties and one of the authors of the report.
The binders and pigments used in the Bamian murals were identified using gas chromatographs at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles and a variety of X-ray technologies at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France
The synchrotron technology enabled researchers to study each layer in the paintings, identifying pigments and binders.
Technology Review: Earthquake researchers in California hope to take advantage of the motion sensors in laptops to create an earthquake-sensing network. By putting computers in homes and businesses to work as seismic monitors, the researchers hope to pull together a wealth of information on major quakes, and perhaps even offer early warnings, giving a few seconds' notice of a potentially devastating quake. The Quake Catcher Network (QCN) is in the beta testing stage, with links to several hundred laptops. It's a distributed computing network, like SETI@home, which searches for intelligent signals from space, and Folding@Home, which focuses on protein folding. Machines in the earthquake network would monitor motion and report big shakes to a central server. If a horde of reports came in from a particular area, it could indicate an earthquake. The network will initially focus on the quake-prone San Francisco Bay and the Greater Los Angeles Basin areas of California.
Los Angeles Times: In the more than a century since 'perfect' platinum-iridium cylinders were first used as the world's kilogram standards, their weights have mysteriously fluctuated. Scientists are rethinking what the measure means.
NPR: In West Virginia, science lessons on climate change have the potential to divide teachers from students, and students from their parents. But one teacher, Tiffany Litton, has earned the trust of her students. Her classroom, she says, is a place for honest inquiry, not a forum for anyone — whether the coal industry or environmentalists — to promote an agenda.
Science: Earth is a complex system in which many biological and physical components interact across all space and time scales. To understand this system, earth scientists have traditionally built large, multi-component models. However, it is difficult to know when such a model has become sufficiently detailed for its task and how confident one can be in its predictions. In a generic linear system with feedbacks, Roe and Baker have shown that normally distributed feedbacks give rise to a highly skewed distribution of responses, similar to those seen for climate sensitivity in ensembles of global models. Even relatively narrow ranges of uncertainty in the feedbacks can be amplified in the response. Thus, besides refining the feedback uncertainties in traditional earth system models, scientists and policy-makers must explore complementary approaches to modeling.
New Scientist: The fielders' nightmare a simple-looking vertical ball that somehow eludes capture has been found to be more complex than it looks
The Post Chronicle: Physicists Create Superinsulators by Staff U.S. and European scientists have discovered a fundamental state of matter that they say opens new directions of inquiry in condensed matter physics. via The Post Chronicle
news.com: If you were at the Exploratorium here the other day, you might well have needed to be wary of flying objects.
That's because, way in the back of the world-class science exploration museum, senior scientist Paul Doherty was giving a primer on why the curveball--one of the most important pitches in baseball--curves.
Of course, being a hands-on kind of scientist, one who had kindly taken time out of his day to explain the physics of baseball, the only way Doherty could explain the science was to demonstrate it. So he was flinging balls everywhere, and boy were they curving.
New York Times: It was the end of January 2005, during the spawning season for a fish appropriately called the black drum. Nightly mating calls were at a crescendo. But no one living in the area seemed to realize the din was of aquatic origin.
James Locascio, a doctoral student in marine science at the University of South Florida, explains that at 100 to 500 hertz, black drum mating calls travel at a low enough frequency and long enough wavelength to carry through sea walls, into the ground and through the construction of waterfront homes like the throbbing beat in a passing car.
“Black drum have taken a liking to the canal system in Cape Coral,” Mr. Locascio said. “Their nightly booming is like a water drip torture that lasts for months.”
New York Times reporter Nonny de la Pena investigates the mystery of how fish make sound, and how the National Marine Fisheries Service is listening to fish sounds in an attempt to discover a new noninvasive way of managing declining fish stocks.
ScienceNews: Two mathematicians, Ce Bian and Andrew Booker of the University of Bristol in England, now have the first glimpse of an elusive mathematical object that may one day help crack the key to the distribution of the prime numbers. They have found the first example of a third-degree transcendental L-function.
The Independent: The two men boarding the Eurostar to Paris this Wednesday will be unremarkable, save for the metallic suitcase they keep in their sight at all times. Their fellow passengers could be forgiven for shuffling away as they eye the words DO NOT DROP in red on the side of the case.
Far from transporting some doomsday device, the two British scientists will be carrying a kilogram of harmless metal. But not just any kilogram: it is the UK standard kilogram, used as the ultimate reference for everything from the accuracy of a grocer's scales to the ingredients in a pill.
Actually, it weighs a fraction more than a kilogram. And that is a problem: as the years go by, it is gaining weight. Scientists from Britain's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) hope that cleaning the weight with a revolutionary new method, invented in the UK, will bring it back closer to its true mass. Long-term comparisons suggest that other nations' benchmark kilos are also gaining weight compared with the prototype in Paris – the definitive kilo based on the weight of a litre of water at 4C – which was cast in 1879.
The Scientist: Not every principal investigator will have a resident Web expert at his or her disposal. Jonathan Scheff of the Scientist, discusses some tips from the designers of the winning Web site to help you design and build the best laboratory Web site.
SFGate: Two physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Earl Cornell and Carl Haber, who develop computer algorithms for analyzing acoustics of all types, have taken a piece of paper embedded with audio waveforms of an unknown French soprano singing "Au Clair de la Lune" from 1860 and converted them into sound. Its the oldest recording known.
Nature: Physicists' search for a theory of everything is entering territory more familiar to biologists: taxonomy. A small team of theorists is meeting in Tucson, Arizona, in April to discuss how to classify the billions upon billions of different possible universes created by string theory, which describes fundamental particles and forces as vibrating strings.
New York Times: Not long ago in this space, I spoke with Michio Kaku, the author of “Physics of the Impossible” and a professor of theoretical physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, about science-fiction-inspired technological breakthroughs that might actually occur within our own lifetimes. This week, Kaku talks about three long dreamt-of technologies that he categorizes as class I, class II and class III impossibilities — in other words, things you’ll simply never see during your time on earth. (Unless, like me, you plan to live forever.)
New Scientist: Long ago, antimatter all but vanished from existence, allowing matter to predominate and form the stars and planets of the universe. Exactly why this happened has been a mystery, but a particle accelerator in Japan may have found a new clue, and one that does not seem to fit the standard model of particle physics.
The Guardian: Bob Cernik likes using x-rays to probe the nature of materials. The Manchester University professor has been working at the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Oxfordshire to develop a prototype 3D colour x-ray system to detect hidden explosives, drugs, or even cancer. Cernik's system uses "tomographic energy dispersive diffraction imaging" - or TEDDI.
TEDDI requires an x-ray source with a pencil-thin beam, a collimator (to put the radiation into parallel beams), a detector, and significant data analysis. The synchrotron provides high energies to penetrate dense metal objects, although Cernik will eventually use compact x-ray sources like the ones used in hospitals.
The end result will be a scanner that should be able to display a false color result of interior of a suitcase in under a minute.
Associated Press: Avraham Trakhtman, a mathematician at Bar-Ilan University who worked as a labourer after emigrating from Russia to Israel, has succeeded in solving the elusive so-called road colouring problem.
The conjecture, posed by Adler, Goodwiyn and Weiss over 38 years ago, assumes that it is possible to create a "universal map" that would direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of their original location.
Related Links
Avraham Trakhtman
The road coloring problem, Israel J. of Math
The road coloring problem (ArXiv)
A history of the Road coloring conjecture (Wikipedia)
Physics Today: Opportunities for amateur astronomers to observe the night sky are becoming rare as light pollution fades the night sky away. Yet, thanks to a new product called Google Sky, a simple desktop computer can provide some unprecedented views of the universe that were previously available only to professional astronomers. Google Sky is based on the same technology as Google Earth and displays the visible universe based on a mosaic of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digitized Sky Survey and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Thumbnail images at the bottom of Google Sky's display can bring up high resolution images of the planets, the constellations, highlights from the Hubble Space Telescope, famous stars, galaxies and nebulae, and views of the universe in the x-ray, ultraviolet and infrared. Other items available through Google Sky include:
* Infrared - An infrared view of the sky from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Change the transparency of this layer by moving the slide bar to blend the optical and infrared.
* Microwave - A view of the microwave sky from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which shows the universe as it was 380,000 years after the big bang.
* Historical - The sky as drawn by Giovanni Maria Cassini (printed in 1792) showing the constellations in their classical form from the collections of David Rumsey.
Other online observatories
Bradford Robotic Telescope
Micro-Observatory
Seeing in the Dark
Slooh
Various: Nearly one in ten troops who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq are on disability because of damaged hearing.
Currently most troops rely on a pair of double-sided earplugs worth $7.40 to protect their hearing in war zones writes Chelsea J. Carter for the associated press. One side of the ear plug is designed to protect from weapons fire and explosions, the other from aircraft and tank noise. But the Marines were not given instructions in how to use the earplugs, and some cut them in half, while others used the wrong sides, making the devices virtually useless.
In any case, hearing protection has its limits. While damage can occur at 80 to 85 decibels — the noise level of a moving tank — the best protection cuts that by only 20 to 25 decibels. That is not enough to protect the ears against an explosion or a firefight, which can range upwards of 183 decibels, said Dr. Ben Balough, a Navy captain and chairman of otolaryngology at the Balboa Navy Medical Center in San Diego.
Nearly 70,000 of the more than 1.3 million troops who have served in the two war zones are collecting disability for tinnitus, a potentially debilitating ringing in the ears, and more than 58,000 are on disability for hearing loss, says the Department of Veterans Affairs, costing the department nearly $805 million annually. The powerful roadside bombs detonated in Iraq cause violent changes in air pressure that can rupture the eardrum and break bones inside the ear. Sixty percent of U.S. personnel exposed to blasts suffer from permanent hearing loss, and 49 percent also suffer from tinnitus, according to military audiology reports. The hearing damage ranges from mild, such as an inability to hear whispers or low pitches, to severe, including total deafness or a constant loud ringing that destroys the ability to concentrate. There is no known cure for tinnitus or hearing loss.
The Navy and Marines have begun buying and distributing state-of-the-art earplugs, known as QuietPro, that contain digital processors that block out damaging sound waves from gunshots and explosions and still allow users to hear everyday noises. They cost about $600 a pair. According to Andrew Tilghman at Marine Times the QuietPro looks like an pod and is integrated into the users radio system, allowing troops to hear their radios and the sounds around them. A digital processor locks up at any sign of a blast that could damage the inner ear, and opens up again immediately after a blast to permit normal sound. The Marines have ordered 48,000 devices to be deployed over the next two years.
The Army also has equipped every soldier being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan with newly developed one-sided earplugs that cost about $8.50, and it has begun testing QuietPro with some troops.
In addition, the Navy is working with San Diego-based American BioHealth Group to develop a “hearing pill” that could protect troops’ ears. An early study in 2003 on 566 recruits showed a 25 to 27 percent reduction in permanent hearing loss. But further testing is planned.
And for the first time in American warfare, for the past three years, hearing specialists or hearing-trained medics have been put on the front lines instead of just at field hospitals, Hoffer said.
The main difficulty however, lies with the troops, who worry that ear plugs and other protection devices might limit awareness of their surroundings, and get them killed. “I think these soldiers are choosing between hearing damage and their lives, in their mind. And that may not literally be true.” said David Fagerlie, head of the American Tinnitus Association.
Related links
Hearing problems a constant reminder of Iraq duty (Stars & Stripes)
Hearing Loss Rises Among U.S. Soldiers in Iraq (American Speech-Language Hearing Association)
High-tech ear gear offers more protection (Marine Times)
Christian Science Monitor: Concrete, one of the most common building materials in the world, has an ugly secret: It's a major source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which contribute to global warming.
Roughly 5 to 10 percent of global CO2 emissions are related to the manufacture and transportation of cement, a major ingredient of concrete. "There is not one single cement company on this planet that is not thinking about how to [reduce emissions]," says Franz-Josef Ulm, a professor of civil engineering who researches concrete at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
Italy's Italcemente is the world's fifth-largest cement producer. It is looking beyond reducing CO2 emissions by creating a cement that actually breaks down airborne pollutants by adding titanium dioxide, which, in the presence of sunlight, acts as a photocatalyer, hastening the decomposition of such pollutants as nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and ozone.
Ulm points out that the structure of human bones, at the molecular level, is similar to that of concrete. While cement must be heated to 1,200 degrees C (2,200 degrees F.) before it achieves strength and structure, bone is formed at 37 degrees C (98.6 degrees F.).
"That makes one think that nature can create at 37 Celsius a material that has similar properties as cement," Ulm says. "Can we mimic that?"
NPR: Larry Abramson reports that the number of University of Maryland computer science graduates has collapsed over the last eight years from 2200 graduates in 2000 to 600 today. Similar trends have been seen at other computer science departments around the country.
news.com: Spanish renewable energy firm Sener and Abu Dhabi's clean-energy initiative, Masdar, announced a joint venture on Wednesday to build several power plants fueled by the sun's heat.
The newly created firm, Torresol Energy, said it plans to build at least two large concentrating solar power plants a year with a goal of generating 320 megawatts over the next 5 years and 1,000 megawatts in 10 years. A large coal-fired power plant typically can produce hundreds of megawatts of electricity.
The initial scope of the project is small compared to the total electrical consumption in the Middle East, but a report from the German Physical Society suggests that 50 years from now, the Middle East could be exporting liquid hydrogen to Europe from massive solar array complexes.
New York Times: After a decade of no activity, two prototype solar thermal plants were recently opened in the United States, with a capacity that could power several big hotels says New York Times reporter Matthew L. Wald. Another 10 power plants are in advanced planning in California, Arizona and Nevada that could provide as much power as a nuclear reactor while built in one fifth the time. As prices rise for fossil fuels and worries grow about their contribution to global warming, solar thermal plants are being viewed as a renewable power source with huge potential.
The Guardian: A study of nearly 65,000 nuclear industry workers over more than 60 years has found a possible link between high radiation exposure and heart disease. The finding was particularly surprising since there is no established biological mechanism that would explain how radiation exposure might cause heart disease. However, the research team stressed that its analysis could not rule out other factors that could explain the link, such as work-related stress or irregular shift patterns.
Nature: The dream of perpetual flight without fuel has inspired pilots to take to the skies in solar-powered planes. Vicki Cleave looks at a mission to fly a solar plane through the night — and around the world.
NanoScienceWorks: Japan's Mazda Motor Corp. is using nanotechnology to deliver what it says is a new generation of catalytic converters that use 70 to 90 per cent less of the precious metals which help to purify exhaust emissions. The converters use nanoparticles of the catalytic metal, less than five nanometers, studded onto the surface of tiny ceramic spheres.
FOXNews: The movie "Jumper," opening Thursday, has a hero with the extraordinary power to teleport anywhere on Earth by imagining the place he wants to go.
Duke University: A Duke University researcher says that his physics theory, which has been applied to everything from global climate to traffic patterns, can also explain another trend: why university rankings tend not to change very much from year to year.
Science News: Mathematician nominated for award for restoring the only known recording of a live Woody Guthrie performance
The New York Times: The saxophone, invented by Adolphe Sax, the Belgian instrument maker, and patented in 1846, is a curved tube of brass with holes. Its vibrations can reach high-pitched wailing notes, particularly when played by jazz musicians like John Coltrane.
Telegraph.co.uk: It has been a problem that's baffled children armed with buckets and spades for generations, yet new research has revealed that building the sturdy sandcastle is easier than first thought.
The New York Times: In a battle waged with popcorn, floodlights, chalk and star power, science and art squared off at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology one night last month.
New York Times: All that glitters golden is not gold. It could be aluminum. Or tungsten. Or another metal of Chunlei Guo’s choosing. In a feat of optical alchemy, Dr. Guo, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester, and Anatoliy Y. Vorobyev, a postdoctoral researcher, use ultrashort laser bursts to pockmark the surface of a metal in a way that is not perceptible to the touch — it still feels smooth to the finger — but that alters how the metal absorbs and reflects light. The result, published in Applied Physics Letters, is that pure aluminum looks like gold, and the appearance is literally skin deep.
Related Links
Colorizing metals with femtosecond laser pulses
Nature: Acoustic method could quickly catch counterfeit coins.
The New York Times: The results of the research project by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Energy Department, released Wednesday, suggest that if households have digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year.
The Hindu: Indian craftsmen and artisans used nanotechnology extensively about 2000 years ago to make weapons and long lasting cave paintings, a Nobel laureate of Chemistry said here.
Wired: Physicist Dr. Robert Lang has turned geek pastime into a source of scientific innovation, using the art of origami to make significant contributions in the fields of astronomy, heart surgery and consumer safety.
NPR: Leonardo da Vinci is known for the "Mona Lisa" and other art masterpieces. But the Renaissance man also invented fluid dynamics and, perhaps, the scientific method.
Los Angeles Times: Scientists scan cities. Response teams are ready. And if there were a lethal device, experts would work on tracing the source.
Channel NewsAsia: To encourage more children to play outdoor, an American company has developed what is known as a sonic playground.
BBC: A new type of super-efficient household light bulb is being developed which could spell the end of regular bulbs.
The New York Times: Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.
Wired: Everybody's favorite cosmologist and climatologist, Rush Limbaugh, did a little bit yesterday on how global warming can't possibly be happening, because, come on, climatologists can't even accurately predict how many hurricanes are coming each year.
Guardian Unlimited: The only known recordings of a brilliant physicist who predicted the existence of parallel universes have been found in the basement of his rock star son's flat.
Washington Post: A small town in Prince George's County near Washington D.C. that has flooded four times in the past four years has put a technology more than 2,000 years old to work in a new $6 million pumping station that residents hope will keep them dry.
The design, known as an Archimedes screw for the 3rd century B.C. Greek mathematician credited with conceiving it, employs a massive, slowly turning screw to lift a huge quantity of water up a short distance. The new station in Edmonston uses three of the screws to raise water the 20 feet necessary to get it up and out of the town and into a levee system that runs along the Anacostia River. Common nearly everywhere else in the world, this is the first Archimedes screw to be used on the east coast for flood protection.
TGDaily: Researchers at Jackson State University have developed an 89% transparent, flexible substrate material which is coated with conductive carbon nanotubes. These are unique in that they remain excellent conductors of electricity even when the material is significantly flexed or bent.
The researchers have used these electrodes to create a flexible light-emitting device. Both the anode and cathode are transparent which, even when repeatedly bent, twisted, rolled or folded completely over, continue to conduct electricity without losing any notable properties.
USA Today: Not quite. But geek heaven abounds on CBS' The Big Bang Theory one of the rare TV sitcoms to employ a physicist.
Telegraph.co.uk: Security guards, police officers and armed forces could become Robocops able to take bullets in their stride, thanks to a carbon nanotechnology yarn which can defect projectiles without a trace of damage.
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