Category Physics

It’s surface changes appearance automatically when exposed to water, whether directly, or via humidity. Pinecones open when dry and close when wet, to provide optimal conditions for spreading seeds. They do so by simply reacting to water—it seeps into the woody leaves (microsporophylls) and causes them to droop. Inspired by this simple process, student Chao Chen of the Royal College of Art in London dissected cones to see how they were put together and then used what he learned to create objects or coverings.

He has created an artificial pinecone, a wall hanging (or covering) that self-modifies when it gets wet to reveal artful coloring, an overhang that allows light to pass through when the sun is shining, but closes when it rains to keep those underneath dry and a strip for insert...

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Applications: plasmonic couplers & lenses that could create 2D holograms or focus light at the nanoscale.

Wakes occur whenever something is traveling through a medium faster than the waves it creates – in the duck’s case water waves, in the plane’s case sonic booms.

While nothing travels faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, light isn’t always in a vacuum. It is possible for something to move faster than the phase velocity of light in a medium or material and generate a wake. The most famous example of this is Cherenkov radiation, wakes produced as electrical charges travel through liquids faster than the phase velocity of light, emitting a glowing blue wake. In this case Harvard researchers created similar wakes of light-like waves moving on #metallic surface = surface plasmons

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New material could make it possible to pack more transistors on a chip. When electrons move in a phosphorus transistor, they do so only in 2D. Thus black phosphorus could help engineers surmount one of the big challenges for future electronics: designing energy-efficient transistors. “Transistors work more efficiently when they are thin, with electrons moving in only two dimensions,” says a/Prof Szkopek, “Nothing gets thinner than a single layer of atoms.”

In 2004, physicists at the University of Manchester first isolated and explored graphene and now there are other 2D materials like black phosphorus, a form of phosphorus similar to graphite and can be separated easily into single atomic layers, ie phosphorene...

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EU-supported research project designed to tap humans’ ability to reason about and manipulate physical objects through the interfaces of computers and mobile devices. ‘This will have all sorts of implications for the future, from everyday interaction with mobile phones to learning with computers and design work,’ … ‘It’s not only about deforming the shape of the screen, but also the digital object you want to manipulate, maybe even in mid-air. Through ultrasound levitation tech, eg we can project the display out of the flat screen. And thanks to deformable screens we can plunge our fingers into it.’

This breakthrough in user interaction with tech allows us to handle objects, data, in a completely new way...

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