University of Michigan researchers have created a transparent silver film that could be used in touchscreens, flexible displays and other advanced applications. L. Jay Guo, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, holds up a piece of the material. Image credit: Joseph Xu/Michigan Engineering.

The thinnest, smoothest layer of silver that can survive air exposure has been laid down at the University of Michigan, and it could change the way touchscreens and flat or flexible displays are made. It could also help improve computing power, affecting both the transfer of information within a silicon chip and the patterning of the chip itself through metamaterial superlenses.

By combining silver with a little bit of aluminum, they found that it was possible to produce exceptionally...

Pocket-sized Retina Camera, no Dilating Required

It’s the part of the eye exam everyone hates: the pupil-dilating eye drops. The drops work by opening the pupil and preventing the iris from constricting in response to light and are often used for routine examination and photography of the back of the eye. The drops sting, can take up to 30 minutes to work, and cause blurry vision for several hours afterwards. Now, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School researchers have developed a cheap, portable camera that can photograph the retina without the need for pupil-dilating eye drops. Made out of simple parts mostly available online, the camera’s total cost is about $185.

“As residents seeing patients in the hospital, there are...

Scientists have discovered that a sphere of cold helium atoms (in green) — interacting with a surrounding larger container of the same kind of atoms (in blue) — follows a bizarre rule of physics, called an entanglement area law, also observed in black holes. This discovery points to a “deeper reality,” says University of Vermont physicist Adrian Del Maestro and may be a step toward using superfluid helium as the fuel of a new generation of ultra-fast quantum computers. Credit: Adrian Del Maestro/Nature Physics

A team has discovered that a law controlling the bizarre behavior of black holes out in space – is also true for cold helium atoms that can be studied in laboratories. “It’s called an entanglement area law,” says Adrian Del Maestro, a physicist at the University of Vermont...

This is a quasar growing under intense accretion streams.
Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

A new computer simulation helps explain the existence of puzzling supermassive black holes observed in the early universe. The simulation is based on a computer code used to understand the coupling of radiation and certain materials. “Supermassive black holes have a speed limit that governs how fast and how large they can grow,” said Joseph Smidt of the Theoretical Design Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “The relatively recent discovery of supermassive black holes in the early

development of the universe raised a fundamental question, how did they get so big so fast?”

Using computer codes developed at Los Alamos for modeling the interaction of matter and radiation related to the Lab’s...