July 06, 2011 - Berkeley Lab Scientists Find Unique Luminescence in Tetrapod Nanocrystals.

Observation of a scientific rule being broken can sometimes lead to new knowledge and important applications.

Such would seem to be the case when scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) created artificial molecules of semiconductor nanocrystals and watched them break a fundamental principle of photoluminescence known as “Kasha’s rule.”

July 01, 2011 - Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers.
 
Today’s silicon-based microprocessor chips rely on electric currents, or moving electrons, that generate a lot of waste heat.

But microprocessors employing nanometer-sized bar magnets – like tiny refrigerator magnets – for memory, logic and switching operations theoretically would require no moving electrons.

July 01, 2011 - Researchers have been investigating the connection between fifth century Himalayan instruments used in religious ceremonies and modern physics.
 
In a study published today, 1 July 2011, in IOP Publishing’s journal Nonlinearity, researchers have captured high speed images of the dynamics of fluid-filled Tibetan bowls and quantified how droplets are propelled from the water’s surface as the bowls are excited.

A Tibetan bowl, generally made from a bronze alloy containing copper, tin, zinc, iron, silver, gold and nickel, is a type of standing bell played by striking or rubbing its rim with a wooden or leather-wrapped mallet.

July 02 2011 -Uncertainty isn't quite what it used to be. For decades, one experiment has served as physicists' canonical example of the uncertainty principle: the law of nature that says you can't know both where a subatomic particle is and how fast it is moving, and thus can't trace its trajectory.

But now physicists have tweaked that classic experiment to show that they can follow the average path taken by many particles, even though it's still impossible to talk about the path of any one of them.

The result shows that limits on what can be known are not as black and white as once thought.