Applied Physics

Charles Hatchett - Tribologist to the Royal Mint Charles Hatchett is widely known as the discoverer of Niobium, but he deserves recogniton for other acheivements also.  He was the first…

Excerpt from “The Terrorism Delusion” by Meuller and Stewart: We have argued that terrorism is a limited problem with limited consequences and that the reaction to it has been excessive, and even…

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have accelerated subatomic particles to the highest energies ever recorded from a compact accelerator -  a laser-…

Using commercial solar cells, researchers have converted over 40 percent of the sunlight hitting a solar system into electricity, the highest efficiency ever reported. Since plant photosynthesis, the…

The diode has a number of applications in electronic circuits. One application you may be familiar with is a rectifier. A rectifier converts alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC).…

Imagine a car that can't get dirty or a business in Ferguson, Missouri that can't be graffiti'ed by unhinged protesters. It might be possible with a new class of highly fluorinated super-repellent…

How is this for the ultimate miniaturization of energy storage: A new tiny nanopore includes all the components of a battery though it is just is a tiny hole in a ceramic sheet that holds an…

The van der Waals force, named after Dutch chemist Johannes Diderik van der Waals, is the total forces between molecules not due due to covalent bonds. The famous sticking power of the geckos is…

Physicists have developed a new cooling technique for mechanical quantum systems by using an ultracold atomic gas, cooling a membrane down to less than 1 degree above absolute zero. Ultracold atomic…

What’s a relay? You’ve probably seen a relay race where one runner hands off a baton to another runner. Similarly, an electronic relay hands off control from one circuit to another. A relay is a…