News tagged with waves

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Auditory illusion: How our brains can fill in the gaps to create continuous sound

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Nov 25, 2009 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

It is relatively common for listeners to "hear" sounds that are not really there. In fact, it is the brain's ability to reconstruct fragmented sounds that allows us to successfully carry on a conversation in a noisy room. ...


Crashing the size barrier

Crashing the size barrier

Physics / General Physics

created Nov 18, 2009 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (15) | comments 6

Like surfers on monster waves, electrons can ride waves of plasma to very high energies in a very short distance. Scientists have proven that plasma acceleration works. Now they're developing it as a way to ...


New nano color sorters from Molecular Foundry

New nano color sorters from Molecular Foundry

Nanotechnology / Nanophysics

created Nov 12, 2009 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (4) | comments 0

Berkeley Lab researchers have engineered a new class of bowtie-shaped devices that capture, filter and steer light at the nanoscale. These "nano-colorsorter" devices act as antennae to focus and sort light ...


Sculptured materials allow multiple channel plasmonic sensors

Physics / Optics & Photonics

created Nov 10, 2009 | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- Sensors, communications devices and imaging equipment that use a prism and a special form of light -- a surface plasmon-polariton -- may incorporate multiple channels or redundant applications if manufacturers ...


A sound practice: Cochlear implants restore children's hearing

Medicine & Health / Research

created Nov 05, 2009 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- Ava Martin seems less nervous than her parents as the three sit in an audiologist’s office at UC Irvine Medical Center a few days after Labor Day. In August, the 6-year-old had surgery to place a cochlear ...


New Digital 'Electronics' Concept May Continue Moore's Law

New Digital 'Electronics' Concept May Continue Moore's Law

Nanotechnology / Nanophysics

created Nov 05, 2009 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (74) | comments 12

(PhysOrg.com) -- Computers of the future could be operating not on electrons, but on tiny waves traveling through an electron "fluid," if a new proposal is successful. The new circuit design, recently introduced ...


Electron self-injection into an evolving plasma bubble

Electron self-injection into an evolving plasma bubble

Physics / Plasma Physics

created Nov 02, 2009 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (4) | comments 1

Particle accelerators are among the largest and most expensive scientific instruments. Thirty years ago, theorists John Dawson and Toshiki Tajima proposed an idea for making them thousands of times smaller: ...


Flipping a photonic shock wave

Flipping a photonic shock wave

Physics / Optics & Photonics

created Nov 02, 2009 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (3) | comments 2

A team of physicists has directly observed a reverse shock wave of light in a specially tailored structure known as a left-handed metamaterial. Although it was first predicted over forty years ago, this is ...


Icebreaker: Scientist brings out the big gun to explore the behavior of ice in planetary collisions

Icebreaker: Scientist brings out big gun to explore behavior of ice in planetary collisions

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Oct 29, 2009 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- Every month, Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay fires her 20-foot gun in the basement of Harvard's Hoffman Lab, sending shivers through the concrete and steel structure that can be picked up by seismometers ...


Fermi telescope caps its first year with a glimpse of space-time

Fermi Telescope Caps First Year With Glimpse of Space-Time (w/ Video)

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Oct 28, 2009 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (14) | comments 5

During its first year of operations, NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope mapped the extreme sky with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. It captured more than one thousand discrete sources of gamma ...


Blast from the Past Gives Clues About Early Universe

Blast from the Past Gives Clues About Early Universe

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Oct 28, 2009 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (9) | comments 5

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope have gained tantalizing insights into the nature of the most distant object ever observed in the ...


Scientists first to trap light and sound vibrations together in nanocrystal

Scientists first to trap light and sound vibrations together in nanocrystal

Nanotechnology / Nanophysics

created Oct 26, 2009 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (18) | comments 9

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have created a nanoscale crystal device that, for the first time, allows scientists to confine both light and sound vibrations in the ...


First hyperlens for sound waves created

First hyperlens for sound waves created

Physics / General Physics

created Oct 25, 2009 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (18) | comments 4

Ultrasound and underwater sonar devices could "see" a big improvement thanks to development of the world's first acoustic hyperlens. Created by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley ...


Scientists Develop New Method to Quantify Climate Modeling Uncertainty

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Oct 21, 2009 | popularity 4.1 / 5 (9) | comments 6

(PhysOrg.com) -- Climate scientists recognize that climate modeling projections include a significant level of uncertainty. A team of researchers using computing facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has identified ...


Hearing on the wing: New structure discovered in butterfly ears

Hearing on the wing: New structure discovered in butterfly ears

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Oct 21, 2009 | popularity 4.4 / 5 (5) | comments 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- A clever structure in the ear of a tropical butterfly that potentially makes it able to distinguish between high and low pitch sounds has been discovered by scientists from the University ...