This is a schematic of the new optical waveguide device showing the input and output gratings and silicon waveguide connections.
Credit: Natasha Litchinitser, Duke University

New photonic crystal waveguide based on topological insulators paves the way to build futuristic light-based computers. Engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a device that can direct photons of light around sharp corners with virtually no losses due to backscattering, a key property that will be needed if electronics are ever to be replaced with light-based devices.

The result was achieved with photonic crystals built on the concept of topological insulators, which won its discoverers a Nobel Prize in 2016...

HCG 98 from the deep r image of the IAC Stripe 82 Project (Fliri & Trujillo 2016). The image has been contrast-stretched and is presented here with a logarithmic look-up table to emphasize faint features. Equatorial J2000 coordinates set the scale of this image, which has north to the top and west to the right.

Discovery illuminates how and why galaxies disappear. A team of astronomers from Israel, the United States and Russia has identified a disrupted galaxy resembling a giant tadpole, complete with an elliptical head and a long, straight tail, about 300 million light years away from Earth. The galaxy is 1 million light-years long from end to end, 10 times longer than the Milky Way. “We have found a giant, exceptional relic of a disrupted galaxy,” says Dr...

Jezero crater is a paleolake and potential landing site for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission to look for past life. The outlet canyon carved by overflow flooding is visible in the upper right side of the crater. Ancient rivers carved the inlets on the right side of the crater.
Credit: NASA/Tim Goudge

Today, most of the water on Mars is locked away in frozen ice caps. But billions of years ago it flowed freely across the surface, forming rushing rivers that emptied into craters, forming lakes and seas. New research led by The University of Texas at Austin has found evidence that sometimes the lakes would take on so much water that they overflowed and burst from the sides of their basins, creating catastrophic floods that carved canyons very rapidly, perhaps in a matter of weeks.

The findings...

A new shoe insole technology could help diabetic ulcers heal better while walking.
Credit: Purdue University image/Kayla Wiles

Researchers have developed a shoe insole that could help make the healing process more portable for the 15 percent of Americans who develop ulcers as a result of diabetes.
Diabetes can lead to ulcers that patients don’t even feel or notice until the sight of blood. And because ulcers can’t heal on their own, 14 to 24% of diabetics in the U.S. who experience them end up losing their toes, foot or leg.

Purdue University researchers have developed a shoe insole that could help make the healing process more portable for the 15 percent of Americans who develop ulcers as a result of diabetes...