(New Jersey Institute of Technology) New Jersey Institute of Technology will host May 19-21, 2008, more than 200 leading experts for the fifth annual Frontiers in Applied and Computational Mathematics Conference, an unusual three-day event featuring leading researchers who will discuss the latest news and research findings in their fields.
(National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) NIST has developed Standard Reference Materials for bitter orange, long used in folk medicine and now increasingly used in herbal weight-loss products. Researchers can use the new materials to develop and test analytical methods for compounds in bitter orange or as control materials for quality assurance.
(National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) A research team working at NIST has found an explanation for the extreme sensitivity to mechanical pressure or voltage of a special class of solid materials called relaxors. The ability to control and tailor this sensitivity would allow industry to enhance a range of devices used in medical ultrasound imaging, loudspeakers, sonar and computer hard drives.
(IEEE-USA) Dr. Kristina M. Johnson, provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, recently received the John Fritz Medal from the American Association of Engineering Societies. She is the first woman so honored.Johnson was one of seven honorees during the AAES' 29th annual awards ceremony in the Great Hall of the National Academy of Engineering on May 5.
(National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) A materials scientist at NIST has deciphered the structure of a new class of materials that can store relatively large quantities of hydrogen. The new analysis may point to a practical hydrogen storage material for automobile fuel cells and similar applications.
(New Jersey Institute of Technology) Daljit Ahluwalia, the visionary, vibrant and long-time chair of NJIT's department of mathematical sciences, will be honored at 6:30 p.m. on May 19, 2008.
(National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) Researchers at NIST have reported a new technique to sort batches of carbon nanotubes by length using high-speed centrifuges. The technique should be easy to scale to industrial quantities for a variety of nanotube applications where length is an important factor.
(National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) Researchers at NIST have confirmed that underground tunnels -- generally a difficult setting for radios -- can have a frequency "sweet spot" at which signals may travel several times farther than at other frequencies. The finding may point to strategies for enhancing rescue communications in subways and mines.
(HCIL) Two new clinical trials presented by Calpis Co., Ltd. at the American Society of Hypertension Twenty-Third Annual Scientific Meeting and Exposition in New Orleans show that the milk-derived dietary supplement AmealPeptide reduces blood pressure in hypertensive patients.
(JFK Communcations) New data show that CAPHOSOL, an advanced electrolyte solution, relieves painful oral mucositis and improves quality of life for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiation therapy. These data will be reported in two separate presentations, one today in an oral podium presentation and one tomorrow as a poster session, at the 33rd Annual Congress of the Oncology Nursing Society.
(International Atomic Energy Agency) Delays and denials of shipments involving regulated radioactive materials used in medicine and industry are of growing concern to safety and industry experts. Meeting in Rome this week at an IAEA workshop, they agreed on an action plan for the Mediterranean region that seeks to ease hardships for hospitals, research centers and organizations that rely on timely delivery of beneficial radiation sources.
(Rice University) Based on Rice and MIT findings, the Court of Arbitration for Sports in Lausanne, Switzerland, has ruled that Pistorius is eligible to participate in International Association of Athletics Federations sanctioned competitions. If he qualifies for the 2008 Beijing games, Pistorius would be the first disabled athlete ever to run against able-bodied athletes in an Olympic event.
(University of Cambridge) Her Majesty's Consul, Kevin Lynch and Science Consul, Dr. May Akrawi will be in New Mexico honoring Senator Domenici's commitment to UK/US scientific collaboration with Professor Peter Littlewood and Dr. Dave Buscher from the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory visiting from the UK for this occasion. At the event, the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology will rename the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Array Operations Center as the "Pete V. Domenici Science Operations Center."
Although a driven colloidal suspension is not at equilibrium, a systematic study shows that such a system can still undergo a phase transition ? albeit to a randomly organized state.
The energy of an atom binding one photon in a cavity can be derived classically. But when two photons are bound to the atom, signatures of light quantization appear in the spectrum. These have now been observed in the optical domain.
A systematic study of ionization and high harmonic generation in strong laser fields at long wavelengths confirms predictions made 40 years ago, and has important implications for the development of attosecond light sources.
The requirement for an object to be surrounded by empty space when imaged by coherent X-ray diffraction was once thought to be a fundamental limitation. A variant of coherent diffractive imaging proves this not to be the case, and substantially widens its potential use.
Accurate measurement of the phase of the high harmonics emitted from aligned CO2 molecules in a strong laser field represent an important step in the generation of shaped attosecond pulses and the coherent control of matter.
Like their classical counterparts, quantum computers can, in theory, cope with imperfections?provided that these are small enough. The regime of fault-tolerant quantum computing has now been reached for a system based on trapped ions, in which a gate operation for entangling qubits has been implemented with a fidelity exceeding 99%.
Defects in Josephson junctions are considered a nuisance when it comes to using superconducting circuits as building blocks for a quantum-information processor. But if the interaction between the circuit and defects is accurately controlled?as has been demonstrated now?the imperfections might be useful, serving as memory elements.
Spins in a two-dimensional triangular lattice are geometrically frustrated and cannot form an ordered ground state. Instead, a spin-liquid state is expected, and now thermodynamic measurements suggest that a spin liquid exists down to the lowest temperatures.
Four electrons in a semiconductor quantum dot exhibit similar correlation effects to those found in a molecule. Excitations of these electrons can be probed by inelastic light scattering, which reveals a decoupling of their rigid rotational motion from their spin excitations.
Unprecedented control over the superposition of electronic states of a ?quantum coral?, by changing the position of a single atom within it, provides a powerful tool for studying the quantum behaviour of matter.
Substantial improvements, through the use of squeezed light, in the sensitivity of a prototype gravitational-wave detector built with quasi-free suspended optics represents the next step in moving such devices out of the lab and into orbit.
When a thermodynamic system is changed sufficiently slowly, entropy is generally conserved and the process is adiabatic, and therefore reversible. However, this adiabaticity does not seem to hold for low-dimensional systems with a high-density of low-energy states.
Solitons are encountered in a wide range of nonlinear systems, from water channels to optical fibres. They have also been observed in Bose?Einstein condensates, but only now have such ?ultracold solitons? been made to live long enough for their dynamical properties to be studied in detail.
Superfluid 3He is a quantum condensate in which the He atoms are paired in an unconventional way. Yet despite extensive research on the collective modes of superfluid 3He, one mode has remained undiscovered, until now.
The analysis of the interference fringes generated by initially independent one-dimensional Bose condensates reveals contributions of both quantum noise and thermal noise, advancing our fundamental understanding of quantum states in interacting many-body systems.
A proposal describes how to detect topologically ordered states of ultracold matter in an optical lattice, and shows how these exotic states, which strongly correlated quantum systems can exhibit, could be harnessed for practical applications, such as robust quantum computation.
