Research into the development of invisibility devices has spurred two physicists' thought on the behaviour of light to overcome the seemingly intractable problem of optical singularities which could soon lead to the manufacturing of a perfect cat's eye. A research paper published in a New Journal of Physics' focus issue 'Cloaking and Transformation Optics' called 'The Transmutation of Singularities in Optical Instruments', written by Thomas Tyc, Masaryk University, and Ulf Leonhardt, the University of St. Andrews and Singapore National University, shows that it is possible to reflect light from all directions........

In a new article in the current issue of American Journal of Sociology authors Daniel A. Menchik and Xiaoli Tian (both of the University of Chicago) study how we use emoticons, subject lines, and signatures to define how we want to be interpreted in email. The authors find that "a shift to email interaction requires a new set of interactional skills to be developed"........

low levels of stress or strain in regions of a semiconductor device as small as 10 nanometers across. Their recent results* not only will impact the design of future generations of integrated circuits but also lay to rest a long-standing disagreement in results between two different methods for measuring stress in semiconductors........

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) held a rescue robot exercise in Texas last week in which about three dozen robots were tested by developers and first responders in order to develop a standard suite of performance tests to help evaluate candidate mechanical rescuers. This exercise was sponsored by the Department of Homeland Securitys Science and Technology Directorate to develop performance standards for robots for use in urban search and rescue missions........

Facial recognition systems perform some very challenging tasks such as checking an individuals photo against a database of known or suspected criminals. The task can become nearly impossible when the systems acquire poor facial imagesa situation that occurs all too often in real-world environments. Now, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have observed that several simple steps can significantly improve the quality of facial images that are acquired at border entry points such as airports and seaports.*........

New ways of squeezing out greater efficiency from solar photovoltaic cells are emerging from computer simulations and lab tests conducted by a team of physicists and engineers at MIT. Using computer modeling and a variety of advanced chip-manufacturing techniques, they have applied an antireflection coating to the front, and a novel combination of multi-layered reflective coatings and a tightly spaced array of lines called a diffraction grating to the backs of ultrathin silicon films to boost the cells' output by as much as 50 percent........

Laboratory scientists have posited an explanation for superconductivity that may open the door to the discovery of new, unconventional forms of superconductivity. In a November 20 Nature letter, research led by Tuson Park and Joe D. Thompson describes a new explanation for superconductivity in non-traditional materials-one that describes a potentially new state of matter in which the superconducting material behaves simultaneously as a nonmagnetic material and a magnetic material........

In the last 10 years, e-mail has gone from a novelty to a necessity. What was once a pastime is now an essential form of communication, with a number of people opening their inboxes to find dozens of e-mails waiting. But how do people respond to those e-mails? Do they act rationally, responding to the most important first, making sure the process is efficient? Or do they send e-mails randomly, when they are at their computers or when they have time, without any regard to efficiency?.......

They've made electronics that can bend. They've made electronics that can stretch. And now, they've reached the ultimate goal -- electronics that can be subjected to any complex deformation, including twisting. Yonggang Huang, Joseph Cummings Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and John Rogers, the Flory-Founder Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have improved their so-called "pop-up" technology to create circuits that can be twisted. Such electronics could be used in places where flat, unbending electronics would fail, like on the human body........

Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear. The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma "jet". This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts........

Canadian scientists have created a new protein patterning technique that's enabled them to reproduce complex cellular environments and a miniature version of a masterpiece painting. As per a new study reported in the journal Lab on a Chip, researchers from Universit de Montral, the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital Research Centre, McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute have developed a laser technology that can mimic the protein patterns that surround cells in vivo and that could lead to great advances in neuroscience........

Clemson physics professor Apparao Rao and his team are researching nano-scale cantilevers that have the potential to read and alert us to toxic chemicals or gases in the air. Put them into a small handheld device and the potential is there for real-time chemical alerts in battle, in industry, in health care and even at home........

Scientists have accurately identified tools that model the atomic and void structures of a network-forming elemental material. These tools may revolutionize the process of creating new solar panels, flat-panel displays, optical storage media and myriad other technological devices. The team, made up of scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, created 3D models of pressure-dependent structures of amorphous red phosphorus (an allotrope of the element phosphorous with different structural modifications) that for the first time are accurately portrayed by neutron and X-ray diffraction studies. They also developed a new method to accurately characterize void structures within network-forming materials........

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a measurement technique that will help researchers and companies map nanomaterials as they grow. The discovery could help create superior nanotechnologies and lead to the development of more efficient solar panels and increased magnetic data storage........

Allowing joint bidding helps reduce potential mismatch between an e-tailer's costs and the consumer's bids on name-your-own-price websites like Priceline, as per the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)........

A novel technique* under development at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) uses a relatively inexpensive optical microscope to quickly and cheaply analyze nanoscale dimensions with nanoscale measurement sensitivity. Termed Through-focus Scanning Optical Microscope (TSOM) imaging, the technique has potential applications in nanomanufacturing, semiconductor process control and biotechnology........

UC San Diego computer researchers have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer researchers only need a photograph of the key. The bumps and valleys on your house or office keys represent a numeric code that completely describes how to open your particular lock. If a key doesn't encode this precise "bitting code," then it won't open your door........

An international team of researchers recently performed the ultimate miniaturization of computer memory: storing information at the nucleus of an atom. The breakthrough is a key step in bringing to life quantum computers, devices based on the theory of quantum mechanics. In the quantum world, objects such as atoms can exist simultaneously in multiple states--that is, they could literally be in two places at once, or possess many other seemingly mutually exclusive properties. Quantum computing is seen as a holy grail of computing because each individual piece of information, or 'bit', can have more than one value at once........

Another step towards quantum computing - the Holy Grail of data processing and storage - was achieved when an international team of researchers that included scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were able to successfully store and retrieve information using the nucleus of an atom........

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder, have made the first tunable noiseless amplifier. By significantly reducing the uncertainty in delicate measurements of microwave signals, the new amplifier could boost the speed and precision of quantum computing and communications systems........