Free Republic

The age of the dinosaurs ended 66 million years ago, when an asteroid six miles in diameter crashed into what is now southeastern Mexico. The world went up in flames. Dinosaurs, along with the massive reptiles that ruled the sea and the sky, perished as forest fires raged across the globe, dust blotted out the sun, and Earth experienced intense heat, frigid cooling, and then more heat. Conventional wisdom states that mammalian diversity emerged from the ashes of the mass extinction, ultimately giving rise to our own humble species. But according to a study in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology,...

A breakthrough in the harnessing of ‘T-rays’ - electromagnetic terahertz waves - which could dramatically improve the detecting and sensing of objects as varied as biological cell abnormalities and explosives has been announced. Researchers at the University of Bath, UK, and in Spain have said they have found a way to control the flow of terahertz radiation down a metal wire. Their findings are set out in a letter published in the current journal Physical Review Letters. The title of the letter is: “Terahertz surface plasmon polariton propagation and focusing on periodically corrugated metal wires”. Terahertz radiation, whose frequency is...