Physics and Astronomy

Physicists in Singapore have succeeded in creating the first paper battery that generates electricity from urine. This new battery will be the perfect power source for cheap, disposable healthcare test-kits for diseases such as diabetes. This research is published today in the Institute of Physics’ Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

Scientists in research groups around the world are trying to design ever smaller “biochips” that can test for a variety of diseases at once

Acceleration and quantum entanglement

Consider that Alice and Bob are two observers at rest separated by a long distance. Each of them has a measuring device that detects, respectively, two different quantum systems. The state of the joint system is said to be maximally entangled if, for many copies of the state, any measurement that Alice makes is completely determined by Bob’s and vice versa.

What would happen to their entanglement if Alice fell into a black ho

APL-Built Spectrometer on NASA’s Latest Mission to the Red Planet

With today’s launch of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars – or CRISM – joins the set of high-tech detectives seeking traces of water on the red planet.

Built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., CRISM is the first visible-infrared spectrometer to fly

Researchers at UCSD and Clemson University have discovered that specially synthesized carbon nanotube structures exhibit electronic properties that are improved over conventional transistors used in computers. In a paper published* in the September issue of Nature Materials and released online on August 14, UCSD Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering professors Prabhakar Bandaru and Sungho Jin, graduate student Chiara Daraio, and Clemson physicist Apparao M. Rao reported that Y-shaped nanotubes beh

Astronomers from the universities of Hertfordshire and Kent have received a grant which will allow them to map large areas of the sky 1000 times faster than with current technology.

The universities, in conjunction with the University of British Columbia and the Joint Astronomy Centre, have been awarded 1,500 hours of observation and survey time on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) at the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii. The award, which is part of the JCMT Major Legac

New work by two researchers at HP Laboratories Bristol sets out to solve one of the major difficulties in quantum computer architectures that use directly interacting qubits.

The problem is that the million-or-so qubits necessary to do useful calculations in a quantum computer would all feel the presence of each other, meaning that the information would leak in an uncontrollable way. The more qubits that are put together this way, the harder it is to control them.

The