Anna Demming

Molecular clock dates for the first animals to walk the Earth don't match the fossil record. Comparing the disparate DNA of two different species and extrapolating how long it would take for them to mutate from a common ancestor ...

Devices flexible enough to be worn in comfort, sensitive enough to measure a pulse and transparent and thus barely noticeable are an attractive prospect for a range of applications from monitoring biometrics to hands-free ...

When probing the subtle effects of quantum mechanics, all the parameters in the system and its measurements need to be finely tuned to observe the result you are hoping for. So what happens when you gear everything towards ...

Decoherence is the bane of quantum technologies. In coherent systems, the phase of the wave functions representing the quantum states of particles in the system have definite relations between each other. This allows quantum ...

Quantum optics, spintronics and diffraction-free imaging with low loss are among the technologies that may benefit from recently predicted effects in twisted bilayer photonic structures. The work takes inspiration from a ...

DNA data storage may become easier to read and write than before, according to researchers at the University of Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory in the U.K. They report on a technique that can also store encrypted data, as ...

Mode control is essential for optical communications and data processing technologies. Whether it's connections and switches in data transmission lines or some sort of non-reciprocal device for optical circuits, the ability ...

Soliton descriptions for the conducting polymers polyacetylene—descriptions based around a type of solitary wave—caused great excitement when they first broke in the seminal reports by Su, Schrieffer, Heeger (SSH) and Kivelson ...

The first demonstration of graphene double quantum dots in which it is possible to control the number of electrons down to zero has been reported in Nano Letters. Far from an abstract academic stunt, the results could prove ...

Over 150 years after the famous Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell first introduced the idea, the concept of Maxwell's demon continues to perplex physicists and information scientists. The demon he dreamed up in a thought ...

The electronics industry might look very different today were it not for the dramatic drop in cost of high-quality single-crystalline silicon wafers over the past five decades. So what would happen if the cost of single-crystalline ...

Despite the progress in perovskite device efficiencies, these systems are not fully understood, in particular the frequency- and power-dependence of their response to light. Yu-Hwa Lo and colleagues at the University of California ...

"Powering a topological superconductor using a time crystal gives you more than the sum of its parts," says Jason Alicea, a researcher at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the US. The discovery of topological ...

One of the cornerstones of quantum theory is a fundamental limit to the precision with which we can know certain pairs of physical quantities, such as position and momentum. For quantum theoretical treatments, this uncertainty ...

Applications of silk fibers have ballooned in recent years. Traditionally attractive in textiles for its compact strength and luxurious soft sheen, silk has potential applications including filtration membranes and coatings ...