Free Republic

Roberta Corson recalled her father’s dissection lab as a happy place. Her father, David L. Bassett, was an expert in anatomy and dissection at the University of Washington. For more than 17 years, he was engaged in creating what has been called the most painstaking and detailed set of images of the human body, inside and out, ever produced. In 3-D. Working closely with William Gruber, the inventor of the View-Master, the three-dimensional viewing system that GAF Corporation popularized as a toy in the 1960s, Dr. Bassett created the 25-volume “Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy” in 1962. It included some...

3D metamaterials. Gold nano split ring resonators are stacked. (Credit: Stuttgart University/ MPI) ScienceDaily (Dec. 24, 2007) — Last year researchers from Duke University stunned the world when they announced a cloaking device for the microwave range. This device made use of metamaterials that had a negative refractive index for electromagnetic radiation. The metamaterials were carefully designed split-ring resonators with a structure size much smaller than the wavelength. Only 10 stacked layers of metamaterials were necessary to achieve the desired invisibility effect. Now, researchers from the group of Harald Giessen at the University of Stuttgart have succeeded in manufacturing...

IBM on Thursday unveiled a technical advancement related to the use of light to carry large amounts of data quickly among cores within a microprocessor, taking the company closer to developing a chip that may one day run notebooks with the horsepower of today's supercomputers. The breakthrough revolves around a device used to transform electrical impulses into beams of light. The device, called a modulator, is similar to what's used today in optical networks built by telecommunication companies. IBM scientists say they have found a way to shrink the modulator to a size where it can fit within a multi-core...

Close window Published online: 1 March 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070226-11 None more blackEngineers make the most anti-reflective coating yet.Dave Mosher Layers of tilted silicon nanorods make a soft landing for light.Fred Schubert/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Shiny metal objects have been reduced to a dull, record-breaking black by a super anti-reflective coating. As Nigel Tufnel from This is Spinal Tap says in the film: "It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black." Today's anti-reflective coatings reduce the reflectivity of an object to less than 1%, which is pretty good. But they often miss...

The Star Trek vision of analysing rocks and minerals with the sweep of a handheld device has taken a step towards becoming science rather than science fiction. "We are developing a tricorder," said Robert Downs, associate professor of geosciences at The University of Arizona in Tucson. Professor Downs is using a technique called Raman spectroscopy to compile a library of spectral fingerprints for all the Earth's minerals. About 1,500 of the 4,000 known minerals have been catalogued so far. Although the current Raman spectrometer takes up an area the size of a tabletop, Professor Downs's colleague M. Bonner Denton, a...

Scientists are over the moon at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the California Institute of Technology over a new discovery of a satellite orbiting the Solar System's 10th planet (2003 UB313). The newly discovered moon orbits the farthest object ever seen in the Solar System. The existence of the moon will help astronomers resolve the question of whether 2003 UB313, temporarily nicknamed "Xena," is more massive than Pluto and hence the 10th planet. A paper describing the discovery was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters on October 3, 2005. "We were surprised because this is a completely different type of...

Scientists seeking a simple solution to the tricky task of separating single cells from a herd of others have found a way of making light of the problem. The new technique dubbed the "optoelectronic tweezer" combines a relatively low intensity light source with photo electricity to allow scientists to literally corral the cells they want to study, and could have major medical implications. "Our design has a strong practical advantage in that, unlike optical tweezers, a simple light source such as a light-emitting diode ... is powerful enough," said Pei Yu Chiou, part of the team led by Ming Wu...

Twisting The Light Away New Scientist vol 182 issue 2451 12 June 2004, page 36 A novel trick with light has got physicists in a spin. Pitch your photon like a corkscrewing curveball and you can push bandwidth through the roof, flummox eavesdroppers and perhaps even talk to aliens. Stephen Battersby investigates IT DOESN'T look like much, just a plain box about half a metre long. Nonetheless, this is the prototype of something with seemingly magical properties. Fire a beam of its laser light at the dust sitting on your tabletop and the dust motes will begin to dance around...

Just ordered a Springfield Armory M1-A. Never owned a rifle before, but I'm sure I'll need a scope. What should I look for?

Explanation:   Light is more complicated than we thought. When astronomers measure light, they are usually concerned with its direction, energy, and spin polarization (sometimes). Recently, however, it has been more broadly realized that photons can also have orbital angular momentum (OAM), an attribute classically analogous to the Earth orbiting the Sun as well as spinning on its axis. Pictured above, the wave-front of a photon with OAM is shown to be twisted, in contrast to the flat plane of zero OAM light. Light with OAM might be used to increase the information content of communication or to discern...

ROCKET SCIENCE Solar Sailing Breaks Laws Of Physics London - Jul 03, 2003 maybe a case of a little too much writer's licence London - Jul 03, 2003 The next generation of spacecraft propulsion systems could be dead in the water before they are even launched. A physicist is claiming that solar sailing- the idea of using sunlight to blow spacecraft across the solar system- is at odds with the laws of thermal physics reports New Scientist this Saturday. Both NASA and the European Space Agency are developing solar sails and, although never tested, the concept is quite simple. A...

Flat Lens Could Significantly Enhance Object Resolution by Nicolle Wahl Toronto - Mar 28, 2003 By constructing artificial materials that break long-standing rules of nature, a U of T researcher has developed a flat lens that could significantly enhance the resolution of imaged objects. This, in turn, could lead to smaller and more effective antennas and devices for cell phones, increased space for data storage on CD-ROMs and more complex electronic circuits. "This is new physics," says George Eleftheriades, a U of T professor specializing in electromagnetic technology at the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 November 14 The Sharpest View of the Sun Credit: SST, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Explanation: This stunning image shows remarkable and mysterious details near the dark central region of a planet-sized sunspot in one of the sharpest views ever of the surface of the Sun. Just released, the picture was made using the Swedish Solar Telescope now in its first year of operation on the Canary...

June 20, 2002 -- Researchers at the University of Toronto have discovered a new technique to form tiny perfect crystals that have high optical quality, a finding that could usher in a new era of ultra-fast computing and communication using photons instead of electrons. These crystals, called photonic crystals, could greatly improve both speed and bandwidth in communications systems, says University Professor Geoffrey Ozin of the Department of Chemistry. "All of the promises of what photonic crystals can do, in terms of guiding light and bending light in incredibly small spaces, may be achieved by the assembly of patterns of...

I'm looking at buying a scope for a Remington model 700 in .338 Win Mag. I would like to get a scope with a range finding recticle, and would like to get freeper feedback on scope preferences and the different range finding recticles such as mil-dot. Are they worth the extra cost? The rifle/scope will be used on Mule Deer (open country), and Elk in dense/lowlight forests. Most game will be at distances less than 200 yards, however I would like to practice with the rifle at targets beyond 600 yards. Any thoughts?