The artist’s rendering shows how potential wells are created for the light in the microresonator through heating with an external laser beam (green). Credit: David Dung, Universität Bonn

Physicists create optical ‘wells’ for a super-photon for the first time. The creation of such highly low-loss structures for light is a prerequisite for complex light circuits, such as for quantum information processing for a new-gen computers. Many thousands of photons can be merged to form a single super-photon if they are sufficiently concentrated and cooled. The individual particles merge with each other, making them indistinguishable. Researchers call this a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. It has long been known that normal atoms form such condensates. Prof...

Only 55 million lightyears away, this is one of the closest supernovae discovered in recent years. Credit: Image courtesy of University of California – Santa Barbara

In the 2009 film “Star Trek,” a supernova hurtles through space and obliterates a planet unfortunate enough to be in its path. Fiction, of course, but it turns out the notion is not so farfetched. Using the nearby Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO), astrophysicists from UC Santa Barbara have observed something similar: an exploding star slamming into a nearby companion star. What’s more, they detected the fleeting blue glow from the interaction at an unprecedented level of detail...

Side-by-side comparison of density “snapshots” produced in a 3-D simulation of jets beaming out from a black hole (at the base of images). Red shows higher density and blue shows lower density. The black directional lines show magnetic field streamlines. The perturbed magnetic lines reflect both the emergence of irregular magnetic fields in the jets and the large-scale deviations of the jets out of the image plane, both caused by the 3-D magnetic kink instability. Credit: Berkeley Lab, Purdue University

Theories and models show how instabilities develop in extreme energy releases from black holes, “These jets are notoriously hard to explain,” said Alexander “Sasha” Tchekhovskoy, a former NASA Edbolt Einsteinein fellow...

Untreated mouse skin showing no hair growth (left) compared to mouse skin treated with the drug UK5099 (right) showing hair growth. Credit: UCLA Broad Stem Cell Center/Nature Cell Biology

UCLA researchers have discovered a new way to activate the stem cells in the hair follicle to make hair grow. The research may lead to new drugs that could promote hair growth for people with baldness or alopecia, which is hair loss associated with such factors as hormonal imbalance, stress, aging or chemotherapy treatment. Hair follicle stem cells are long-lived cells in the hair follicle; they are present in the skin and produce hair throughout a person’s lifetime...