Intricate patterns formed by granular materials under the influence of electrostatic fields have scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory dreaming of new ways to create smaller structures for nanotechnologies. With a combination of electric fields and fluid mixtures, researchers Igor Aronson, Maksim Sapozhnikov, Yuri Tolmachev and Wai Kwok can cause tiny spheres of bronze and other metals to self-assemble into crystalline patterns, honeycombs, pulsating rings and

A bacterium’s ability to change its hairstyle may help in the effort to clean contaminated groundwater for drinking, according to Penn State researchers.

People are continually moving into places that are hot, sunny and arid where drinking water is in short supply, says R. Kramer Campen, Penn State graduate student in geosciences. “The imperative to find ways to clean groundwater is paramount,” he told attendees today (March 25) at the 225th American Chemical Society national meeting i

Supermassive black holes, notorious for ripping apart and swallowing stars, might also help seed interstellar space with the elements necessary for life, such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and iron, scientists say.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite, scientists at Penn State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found evidence of high-speed winds blowing away copious amounts of gas from the cores of two quasar galaxies, which are

Intelligent environment learns and is technically interactive

VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, has developed technology which operates through people’s gestures. The new concept is currently being introduced for research purposes at Italdesign-Giugiaro S. p.a. the Italian car design firm. The same technology is used in wireless terminal equipment user interface research in the Netherlands at the Philips research centre HomeLab.
This VTT technology known as gesture inter

Eye diseases and circulation problems can now be observed in full colour thanks to the development of a scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO) that operates simultaneously with low-power red, green and blue lasers. Dr Ayyakkannu Manivannan will report the latest test results on the SLO at the Institute of Physics Congress at Heriot-Watt University on Tuesday 25 March. He will demonstrate how the SLO system can reveal early retinal damage in diabetic patients and inflammatory macular disease in the elde

Scrap tyres could provide an inexpensive source of raw materials for the chemical industry, according to Professor Paul Williams of the University of Leeds who will speak on Tuesday 25 March at the Waste Management conference, part of the Institute of Physics Congress at Heriot-Watt University.

Approximately 150 million scrap tyres are generated throughout Europe each year, about a fifth of those in the UK alone. Most of these are simply buried in landfills or accumulate in enormous scrap-ty