"Researchers have identified a burst of high-energy radiation known as 'dark lightning" immediately preceding a flash of ordinary lightning. The new finding provides observational evidence that the two phenomena are connected, although the exact nature of the relationship between ordinary bright lightning and the dark variety is still unclear, the scientists said." DARK LIGHTNING

"Put simply, antimatter is identical to matter except that it exists with an opposite electrical charge. In this new research, the team was studying mesons—a group that along with other particles are made up of quarks. Mesons are made up of just two quarks, one matter, the other antimatter. Research over the years has led to theories that the quarks that exist as part of mesons, can oscillate between matter and antimatter."

Rachel Armstrong at our Eindhoven thing. She is brilliant.

"Imagine a cell phone charger that recharges your phone remotely without even knowing where it is; a device that targets and destroys tumors, wherever they are in the body; or a security field that can disable electronics, even a listening device hiding in a prosthetic toe, without knowing where it is."

"The New York Times reported Monday that the Obama Administration is close to announcing the Brain Activity Map, which scientists quoted by the paper say could be on the scale of the The Human Genome Project, a $3.8 billion project to map the human genome that, the Times reported, returned $800 billion in jobs and other benefits."

"How would you like to replace your water heater with a nuclear reactor? That's what Joseph Zawodny, a senior scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, hopes to help bring about. It would tap the enormous power of the atom to provide hot water for your bath, warm air for your furnace system, and more than enough electricity to run your house and, of course, your electric car."

"If an object traveling through spacetime can loop back in time in a certain way, then its trajectory can allow a pair of its components to be measured with perfect accuracy, violating Heisenberg's uncertainty principle"

"An experimental device allowed the rats to "touch" infrared light - which is normally invisible to them."

"In 2010, researchers at Caltech led by Chiara Daraio, a professor of aeronautics and applied physics, developed a nonlinear acoustic lens that can focus high-amplitude pressure pulses into compact "sound bullets." In that initial work, the scientists demonstrated how sound bullets form in solids. Now, they have done themselves one better, creating a device that can form and control those bullets in water." SOUND BULLETS. Ah, world, you are too good to me, some days.

"...practical quantum routers and the quantum internet that relies on them are just around the corner."

"If superparticles were to exist the decay would happen far more often. This test is one of the "golden" tests for supersymmetry and it is one that on the face of it this hugely popular theory among physicists has failed."

"Kopeikin's research suggests that the photons move faster than expected from the Newtonian theory thus causing the appearance of deceleration, though the craft were actually traveling at the correct speed predicted by the theory."

PHOTON SIEVE

"the new aerogel"

He suggested that it should be possible to construct a so called space-time crystal by adding a fourth dimension, movement in time, to the structure of a crystal, causing it to become an infinitely running clock of sorts

"An international research breakthrough with bees means machines might soon be able to see almost as well as humans. The Australian and French research shows that honeybees use multiple rules to solve complex visual problems."

"In this context, teleportation is used to denote the exchange of information describing the states of two separate entities without having to move any actual information through the space between them."

Best headline today. Also: 'In any universe described by the theory of relativity, time cannot exist.'

"An artificially excavated limestone pit in the south of France will soon host star-making technology, New Scientist reports. "If all goes well," the magazine explains, in a few year's time the pit will "rage with humanity's first self-sustaining fusion reaction, an artificial sun ten times hotter than the one that gives our planet life.""

"Bacteria normally found 30 kilometres above Earth have been identified as highly efficient generators of electricity."

"Carvajal and his team resurrected a number of different yeast strains, but not a one was saccharomyces cerivisiae — the yeast used in contemporary fermentation techniques. In fact, two of the strains were a new species entirely, and beonged to the genus Candida, many species of which are known to cause skin and vaginal infections. Carvajal's team named the new species C. theae, meaning "tea.""

"Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek lays out the mathematics of how an object moving in its lowest energy state could experience a sort of structure in time. Such a “time crystal” would be the temporal equivalent of an everyday crystal, in which atoms occupy positions that repeat periodically in space."

"some of the most reliable gossips in the particle-physics blogosphere had being saying to expect news of evidence for a supersymmetry particle – or sparticle – to come from the Large Hadron Collider today... four or five searches for several supersymmetric partners of various quarks and leptons – squarks and sleptons called the stop, stau and sbottom..."

" Remote Sensing is a technology for sampling electromagnetic radiation comprising a signal emanating from its source target that is used to acquire and interpret non-contiguous geospatial data from which to extract information about features, objects, and classes on the Earth's land surface, oceans, and atmosphere (and, where applicable, on the exteriors of other bodies in the Solar System, or, in the broadest framework, celestial bodies such as stars and galaxies)."

"The genome represents the first high-coverage, complete genome sequence of an archaic human group - a leap in the study of extinct forms of humans. “We hope that biologists will be able to use this genome to discover genetic changes that were important for the development of modern human culture and technology, and enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world, starting around 100,000 years ago” says Pääbo."

"...it’s emblematic of the fact that there’s an enormous amount we don’t know about the world around us. It makes me wonder how many other things there are like this."

"Physicists have found the strongest evidence yet of quantum effects fuelling photosynthesis."

"This animation shows a Calabi-Yau surface which is a projection of these higher dimensions into the more familiar dimensions we are aware of."

"The Ekpyrotic Model of the Universe proposes that our current universe arose from a collision of two three-dimensional worlds (branes) in a space with an extra (fourth) spatial dimension."

"hypersurface of the present" - always loved that term

"The use of ultra-cold atoms leads to circuit elements that allow for the coherent flow of information and may be useful in connecting classical electronic devices and quantum computers." ATOMTRONICS!

A simple atomic nucleus could reveal properties associated with the mysterious phenomenon known as time reversal and lead to an explanation for one of the greatest mysteries of physics: the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.

"Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light."

"Materials scientists at the University of Washington have built a novel transistor that uses protons, creating a key piece for devices that can communicate directly with living things...Applications in the next decade or so, Rolandi said, would likely be for direct sensing of cells in a laboratory. The current prototype has a silicon base and could not be used in a human body. Longer term, however, a biocompatible version could be implanted directly in living things to monitor, or even control, certain biological processes directly."

Scientists at the University of Glasgow say they have taken their first tentative steps towards creating 'life' from inorganic chemicals potentially defining the new area of 'inorganic biology'.

Reanalyzing the problem using string theory techniques used in the past to analyze black holes reveals a range of wormhole diameter-to-energy ratios that appear stable.

"Antimatter is a puzzle because it should have been produced in equal amounts with normal matter during the Big Bang that created the universe 13.6 billion years ago. Today, however, there is no evidence of antimatter galaxies or clouds, and antimatter is seen rarely and for only short periods, for example during some types of radioactive decay before it annihilates in a collision with normal matter."

In his talk at this year's Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO: 2011, May 1 - 6 in Baltimore), Fischer will describe the first-ever demonstration of a three-dimensional invisibility cloak that works for visible light—red light at a wavelength of 700 nm—independent of its polarization (orientation). Previous cloaks required longer wavelength light, such as microwaves or infrared, or required the light to have a single, specific polarization.

"It is well known that bacterial and other types of cells use electromagnetic waves at higher frequencies to communicate as well as to send and store energy. If cells can also generate radio waves, there's no reason to think they wouldn't exploit this avenue too."

"When atoms combine to form compounds, they must follow certain bonding and valence rules. For this reason, many compounds simply cannot exist. But there are some compounds that, although they follow the bonding and valence rules, still are thought to not exist because they have unstable structures. Scientists call these compounds "impossible compounds." Nevertheless, some of these impossible compounds have actually been fabricated..."

"They suggested that the early universe -- which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first -- was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today)."

"Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland have created the first nontrivial "atom circuit," a donut-shaped loop of ultracold gas atoms circulating in a current analogous to a ring of electrons in a superconducting wire. The circuit is "nontrivial" because it includes a circuit element—an adjustable barrier that controls the flow of atom current to specific allowed values."

"...they connected a powerful electrical amplifier to a wand-like probe and used the device to shoot beams of electricity at an open flame more than a foot high. Almost instantly, the flame was snuffed out. Much to their fascination, it worked time and again."

"Researchers from North Carolina State University have investigated the viability of a technique called "spincasting" for creating thin films of nanoparticles on an underlying substrate – an important step in the creation of materials with a variety of uses, from optics to electronics."

"Estrogen receptor (ER) proteins play a major role in controlling the transcription of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA in cells. Understanding how ER proteins interact with specific DNA regulatory sequences may shed new light on important physiological processes in the body, such as cell growth and differentiation, as well as the development and progression of breast cancer. Guo-Jun Zhang at the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics and co-workers have now developed a detector that uses silicon nanowires (SiNWs) to evaluate these interactions."

"Scientists today claimed one of the milestones in the drive for sustainable energy — development of the first practical artificial leaf. Speaking here at the 241st National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, they described an advanced solar cell the size of a poker card that mimics the process, called photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert sunlight and water into energy."

"The science similar to the type used in airport body scanners could soon be used to detect everything from defects in aerospace vehicles or concrete bridges to skin cancer, thanks to researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology."

"Among the many intriguing concepts in Einstein’s relativity theories is the idea of closed timelike curves (CTCs), which are paths in spacetime that return to their starting points. As such, CTCs offer the possibility of traveling back in time..."

THE ANTI-LASER

"In a complex feat of nanoengineering, a team of scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Oxford have succeeded in creating a programable molecular transport system, the workings of which can be observed in real time."

Prof. Eran Rabani of Tel Aviv University's School of Chemistry and his colleagues at Columbia University have discovered a new quantum mechanical effect with glass-forming liquids. They've determined that it's possible to melt glass — not by heating it, but by cooling it to a temperature near Absolute Zero.

"Using a common metal most famously found in self-cleaning ovens, Sossina Haile hopes to change our energy future. The metal is cerium oxide—or ceria—and it is the centerpiece of a promising new technology developed by Haile and her colleagues that concentrates solar energy and uses it to efficiently convert carbon dioxide and water into fuels."

New research has shown that it is possible and affordable for the world to achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, if there is the political will to strive for this goal.

"As if the idea ideas of quantum entanglement and time travel weren’t difficult enough to wrap one’s head around separately, two physicists at the Universtiy of Queensland in Australia have further compounded the headache by merging the two ideas via a new kind of quantum entanglement that links particles not across space, but across time."