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UNDATED (NBC) - As we say goodbye to 2012, we're also saying goodbye to a fixture in America's lighting fixtures: The 75-watt incandescent light bulb. Under federal law, 75-watt bulbs can no longer be produced or imported as of January 1st, though retailers can still clear remaining stock. **SNIP** Traditional 60 and 40 watt bulbs will be phased out in 2014.

A discovery that promises transistors – the fundamental part of all modern electronics – controlled by laser pulses that will be 10,000 faster than today's fastest transistors has been made by a Georgia State University professor and international researchers. Professor of Physics Mark Stockman worked with Professor Vadym Apalkov of Georgia State and a group led by Ferenc Krausz at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and other well-known German institutions.There are three basic types of solids: metals, semiconductors, used in today's transistors, and insulators – also called dielectrics.Dielectrics do not conduct electricity and get damaged or break...

EnlargeEngineers at Caltech have created a device (illustrated here) that can focus light into a point just a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) across -- an achievement they say may lead to next-generation applications in computing, communications, and imaging. Credit: Young-Hee Lee (Phys.org)—As technology advances, it tends to shrink. From cell phones to laptops—powered by increasingly faster and tinier processors—everything is getting thinner and sleeker. And now light beams are getting smaller, too. Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a device that can focus light into a point just a few nanometers (billionths of a...

Scientists at the Wake Forest University have created a new type of light bulb that promises to be just as efficient as LED equivalents, but without any of the drawbacks. The new field-induced polymer electroluminescent bulbs — FIPEL for short — produce light when an electric current is passed through the nano-engineered plastic layers. The team says that the new type of bulbs are malleable, allowing them to take any shape like compact fluorescent lamps. They also won’t shatter like traditional bulbs, nor will they generate the same hum or flicker. The inventor of FIPEL, Dr David Carroll, believes that...

Technique may enable robotic animals that move with the strength and flexibility of their living counterparts.Many robotic designs take nature as their muse: sticking to walls like geckos, swimming through water like tuna, sprinting across terrain like cheetahs. Such designs borrow properties from nature, using engineered materials and hardware to mimic animals’ behavior. Now, scientists at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania are taking more than inspiration from nature — they’re taking ingredients. The group has genetically engineered muscle cells to flex in response to light, and is using the light-sensitive tissue to build highly articulated robots. This “bio-integrated” approach,...

People often say that time speeds up as we age, but if the latest scientific theory is true the opposite could well be the case. The radical theory by academics suggests that time itself could be slowing down - and may eventually grind to a halt altogether. The latest mind-bending findings - put forward by researchers working at two Spanish universities - proposes that we have all been fooled into thinking the universe is expanding. In fact, they say, time itself is slowing down until eventually, in billions of years time, it will cease altogether. Although the findings might sound...

Compact device promises to open window on chemical reactions in the lab. The pressurized, cylindrical chamber fits in the palm of Margaret Murnane’s hand. Yet out of one end of the device comes an X-ray beam that packs almost as much punch as the light generated by massive particle accelerators. Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, both physicists at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, a joint institute of the University of Colorado and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, have reported the first tabletop source of ultra-short, laser-like pulses of low energy, or ‘soft’, X-rays. The light, capable of probing the...

Remember how we must live and to who all the praises we must give.

Enlarge Image Bending the rules. Light normally travels in straight lines, but with some clever pre-adjustment, it curves instead. Credit: F. Courvoisier and J. M. Dudley Any physics student knows that light travels in a straight line. But now researchers have shown that light can also travel in a curve, without any external influence. The effect is actually an optical illusion, although the researchers say it could have practical uses such as moving objects with light from afar. It's well known that light bends. When light rays pass from air into water, for instance, they take a sharp turn;...

‘Rite for the Blessing of a Child in the Womb’ approved by RomeWASHINGTON (March 26, 2012) -- The Vatican has approved the publication of the "Rite for the Blessing of a Child in the Womb," which will be printed in English and Spanish in a combined booklet and should be available for parishes by Mothers' Day. The U.S. bishops who collaborated on the development of the blessing welcomed the announcement of the recognitio, or approval, by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in Rome. "I'm impressed with the beauty of this blessing for human life...

There is no doubt that Israel is ready to carry out a first strike against Iran, Shlomo Gazit, former head of Israeli intelligence, told RT. And Israel will not seek any approval from the US or even its own citizens to make such a move.

(CNSNews.com) – Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has pledged multiple times that he would repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s signature health care reform law. However, his repeal proposals are light on specific details. “If I were president, day one I will take action to repeal Obamacare. It's bad medicine. It's bad economy. I'll repeal it,” Romney said at the Jan. 26 GOP debate in Florida. “And I believe the people -- I believe the people of each state should be able to craft programs that they feel are best for their people.” However, Romney’s plans...

. . . . The scientists investigated the effect of different types of outdoor lighting on light pollution and Melatonin, in order to suggest practical steps for balancing productivity, energy expenditure and public health. White LED light (which is actually blue light on the spectrum) is emitted at short wavelengths of between 440-500 nanometers. The study showed that this type of light suppresses the body’s production of Melatonin five times more than the orange-yellow light given off by traditional high-pressure sodium (HPS) bulbs.

AP Photo/Heather Deal, Cornell University Scientists demonstrate how they have have created a new invisibility technique that doesnt just cloak an object -- like in Harry Potter books and movies -- but masks an entire event by briefly bending the speed of light around an event. In this illustratio, an art thief walks into a museum and steasl a painting without setting off laser beam alarms or even showing up on surveillance cameras. WASHINGTON – It's one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter's mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have...

Enjoy this season’s Christmas lights; next Christmas it will be considerably more expensive to run the lights that adorn Christmas trees, homes and businesses in many areas around the country, including Michigan. Most American households would have preferred a lump of coal in their stocking from the Environmental Protection Agency rather than the Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) rule issued by the agency today. The rule is aimed at coal-fired power plants, mandating among other things a 90 percent reduction in mercury emissions. This may be the most expensive regulation on utilities issued by the EPA to date, estimated to...

*snip* Sometimes when Rhonda hugged Hero she would softly pet her face and coo, “Justin, are you in there?” It was Rhonda’s gentle way of remembering their son and his last living connection to Hero. At one point, Hero wandered off and took a stroll in the backyard. All of a sudden, the clouds broke and a light began to solidify in a beam directly down on Hero — a kind of vertical halo.

New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light. The collaboration today submitted its results to a journal, but some members continue to insist that further checks are needed before the result can be considered sound. OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus) measures the properties of neutrinos that are sent through the Earth from the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and arrive in its detector located under the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy. On 22 September,...

Enlarge Image Flipping brilliant! Using only light, scientists can switch this little bridge of silicon between its "bowed up" configuration (top) and its "bowed down" configuration. Credit: M. Bagheri et al., Nature Nanotechnology, Advance Online Publication (2011) The feeble force of light alone can flip a nanometer-sized mechanical switch one way or the other, a team of electrical engineers reports. The little gizmo holds its position without power and at room temperature, so it might someday make a memory bit for an optical computer. Other researchers say it also introduces a promising new twist into the hot field of...

Legislation that could let Michigan escape the federal phaseout and ban on traditional light bulbs is now in the Senate Regulatory Reform Committee. As widely expected, House Bill 4815 was passed on a 62-46 mostly party-line vote in the GOP-controlled House last week. Rep. Matthew Lori, R-Constantine, was the lone Republican to vote against the legislation, while Rep. Richard LeBlanc, D-Westland, was the lone Democrat to vote in favor of it. Rep. Kurt Damrow, R-Port Austin, was not present. Now that the measure has moved over to the Senate, its fate is uncertain. Not only is it unclear what the...

An independent experiment confirms that subatomic particles have wrong energy spectrum for superluminal travel. The claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light has been given a knock by an independent experiment. On 17 October, the Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signals (ICARUS) collaboration submitted a paper1 to the preprint server arXiv.org, in which it offered a rebuttal of claims2 to have clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. The original results were published on 22 September by the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment. Both experiments are based at Gran Sasso National Laboratory...