A computer memory chip based on carbon nanotubes has passed a manufacturing milestone, according to the US company developing the technology. The prototype chip would store information using hundreds of billions of nanotubes with a theoretical capacity of 10 gigabits of data, says Nantero, based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Claims of “unexpected and stunning new physical phenomena” are rare in the abstract of a reputable scientific paper. But the latest report by photonics crystal pioneer John Joannopoulos and his group at MIT, soon to be published in Physical Review Letters, does not disappoint.

The researchers document the ultimate control over light: a way to shift […]

The newest staff member at The Johns Hopkins Hospital stands just over 5 feet and looks like an oversized vacuum cleaner with a video screen for a head. “DR. ROBOT” is part of a study at Hopkins that asks: If a patient’s own doctor isn’t physically available, would that patient rather see and talk with […]

A widespread belief among physicists nowadays is that modern science requires squadrons of scientists and wildly expensive equipment.
Craig Wallace and Philo T. Farnsworth are putting the lie to all that.
Wallace, a baby-faced tennis player fresh out of Spanish Fork High School, had almost the entire physics faculty […]

As a child in the early ’70s, alexander Sulakvelidze dreamed of rising to the top of the Soviet scientific establishment. Fascinated by life at the smallest scales, he earned his PhD in microbiology from Tbilisi State Medical University in his hometown, the capital of Soviet Georgia. By the time he was 27, he was deputy […]

Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. Without inherited material they cannot be described as alive, but the researchers believe these curious spheres may offer a radical new explanation for how life began.

Eight years ago, nanometer-sized features resembling bacteria were discovered in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. Although some scientists think nanometer-sized life can’t exist, others contend that nanobacteria are the new frontier in life science. A recent study published in the journal Geology suggests that the nanometer-sized structures are proof of life. Have we had the proof […]

A devastating burst of gamma rays may have caused one of Earth’s worst mass extinctions, 443 million years ago. A team of Astrophysicists and palaeontologists says the pattern of trilobite extinctions at that time resembles the expected effects of a nearby gamma-ray burst (GRB). Although other experts have greeted the idea with some scepticism, […]