Category Physics

Discovery opens up new routes for photodynamic therapy and drug development. Columbia University scientists, in collaboration with researchers from Harvard, have succeeded in developing a chemical process to convert visible light into infrared energy, allowing innocuous radiation to penetrate living tissue and other materials without the damage caused by high-intensity light exposure.

“The findings are exciting because we were able to perform a series of complex chemical transformations that usually require high-energy, visible light using a noninvasive, infrared light source,” said Tomislav Rovis, professor of chemistry at Columbia and co-author of the study...

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered a simple new tweak that could double the efficiency of organic electronics. OLED-displays, plastic-based solar cells and bioelectronics are just some of the technologies that could benefit from their new discovery, which deals with “double-doped” polymers.

The majority of our everyday ele...

A new wave of semiconductors that can be painted on is on the horizon. It bears the promise of revolutionizing lighting all over again and of transforming solar energy. Ornate quantum particle action, revealed here, that drives the new material’s properties defies the workings of established semiconductors.

LED lights and monitors, and quality solar panels were born of a revolution in semiconductors that efficiently convert energy to light or vice versa...

Rather than building up plastic filaments layer by layer, a new approach to 3D printing lifts complex shapes from a vat of liquid at up to 100 times faster than conventional 3D printing processes, University of Michigan researchers have shown.

3D printing could change the game for relatively small manufacturing jobs, producing fewer than 10,000 identical items, because it would mean that the objects could be made without the need for a mold costing upwards of $10,000. But the most familiar form of 3D printing, which is sort of like building 3D objects with a series of 1D lines, hasn’t been able to fill that gap on typical production timescales of a week or two.

“Using conventional approaches, that’s not really attain...