Optics

We have long been fascinated by the concept of absolute zero, the temperature at which everything comes to a complete stop, but physics tells us absolute zero cannot be reached but only approached -…

Engineers working in optical communications bear more than a passing resemblance to dreamers chasing rainbows. They may not wish literally to capture all the colors of the spectrum, but they do seek…

An international team has reached a milestone in the construction of one of the largest ever cameras to detect the mysterious Dark Energy component of the Universe. The pieces of glass for the five…

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have taken a page from sports physiology and developed a low-cost optical sensor to measure the force with which tiny, migrating somatic cells push themselves…

Astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet only three times more massive than our own, the smallest yet observed orbiting a normal star. The star itself is not large, perhaps as little as one…

The world's first optical pacemaker is described in an article published today in Optics Express. A team of scientists at Osaka University in Japan show that powerful, but very short, laser pulses…

Eta Carinae has the shape of a 'little man' and surrounds a star doomed to explode within the next 100 000 years. Being brighter than one million Suns, Eta Carinae is the most luminous star known in…

Humor- Comics are supposed to be fun, light reading. Something I read on MSNBC’s Comics & Games website has been on my mind for a few months. The column titled "News of the Weird" by Chuck…

University of Utah engineers took an early step toward building superfast computers that run on far-infrared light instead of electricity: They made waveguides -- the equivalent of wires -- that…

A team of scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder, has shown that by sampling a person’s…