Chongqing, China--Dr. Tao Zhu and his team of researchers from Chongqing University, Southwest China, have discovered a new method to highly compress laser linewidth based on Rayleigh backscattering. Using their new method, Rayleigh backscattering can be collected in any waveguide structure and all wave bands to effectively compress a laser linewidth to merely hundreds of hertz, which could have a revolutionary impact on the field of laser technology. This makes it possible for portable laser devices to achieve an ultra-narrow linewidth at room temperature, which until ...

Spam spreads much faster and to more people when it is being propagated by hacked, or otherwise compromised, email accounts rather than legitimate accounts, according to research published in the International Journal of Security and Networks. The insight should help those modeling the dynamics of information diffusion as well as those hoping to track and trace spam with a view to slowing or blocking its propagation. Spam traditionally contained ads for fake or counterfeit products, but currently also contains disruptive rumors and information of a political nature. Ghita ...

Long-sightedness caused by age could be due to proteins in the lens of the eye that are converted from a fluid solution to a solid, glassy state. This has been shown in a study by researchers from institutions including Lund University. Around the age of 40-50, many people find their sight deteriorates and they need to use reading glasses. This age-related long-sightedness is thought to be due to a reduction in the elasticity of the lens in the eye. A new research study appears to have put its finger on the details of what happens in the eye when long-sightedness develops. "This ...

How do the genes in the cells inside the body's muscles respond when the muscles are put to work? And how are these genes affected when muscles are not used? What importance do activity and, on the other hand, lack of activity have for the organism's metabolism, and thus also for diseases such as diabetes and obesity? These questions form the basis for a new study from the Department of Public Health at Aarhus University and the Institute of Sports Medicine at Bispebjerg Hospital. For the first time, the study compares the reactions of all genes in the muscles to diverse ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA - The Laguna del Maule Volcanic Field, Chile, includes a record of unusually large and recent concentration of silicic eruptions. Since 2007, the crust there has been inflating at an astonishing rate of 25 centimeters per year. This unique opportunity to investigate the dynamics of a large rhyolitic system while magma migration, reservoir growth, and crustal deformation are actively under way is stimulating a new international collaboration. Explosive eruptions of large-volume rhyolitic magma systems are common in the geologic record and pose a ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Buck Rogers surely couldn't have seen this one coming, but at NASA's request, University of Florida researchers have figured out how to turn human waste -- yes, that kind -- into rocket fuel. Adolescent jokes aside, the process finally makes useful something that until now has been collected to burn up on re-entry. What's more, like so many other things developed for the space program, the process could well turn up on Earth, said Pratap Pullammanappallil, a UF associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering. "It could be used on ...

DESPITE a sequence of stellar performances by Britain's female athletes and team game players, coverage of women's sport in the Press still occupies a fraction of the space given to men, according to University of Huddersfield lecturer Deirdre O'Neill, who has analysed thousands of articles in newspapers that she describes as a "football-saturated boyzone". One side effect of this marginalisation of women's sport is that girls - with fewer role models to admire - are much less likely to take part themselves. They leave school half as active as young men, leading to potential ...

Bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that mouse embryos are contemplating their cellular fates in the earliest stages after fertilization when the embryo has only two to four cells, a discovery that could upend the scientific consensus about when embryonic cells begin differentiating into cell types. Their research, which used single-cell RNA sequencing to look at every gene in the mouse genome, was published recently in the journal Genome Research. In addition, this group published a paper on analysis of "time-course"single-cell data ...

Latest research on the oldest surviving rock art of Southeast Asia shows that the region's first people, hunter-gatherers who arrived over 50,000 years ago, brought with them a rich art practice. Published this week in the archaeological journal Antiquity, the research shows that these earliest people skilfully produced paintings of animals in rock shelters from southwest China to Indonesia. Besides these countries, early sites were also recorded in Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia. Griffith University Chair in Rock Art Professor Paul Taçon led the research which ...

A Brigham and Women's Hospital-led team has identified a long sought-after partner for a key immune protein, called TIM-3, that helps explain its two-faced role in the immune system -- sometimes dampening it, other times stimulating it. This newly identified partner not only sheds light on the inner workings of the immune system in diseases such as HIV, autoimmunity, and cancer, but also provides a critical path toward the development of novel treatments that target TIM-3. The researcher's findings appeared last month in the journal Nature. "There has been a lot of confusion ...

Conservationists are always looking for ways to halt the pace of deforestation in tropical rainforests. One approach involves recultivating abandoned agricultural land. An international team* investigating this concept has just published its findings in Nature Communications. Working in the mountainous regions of Ecuador, the researchers found afforestation and intense pasturing to be particularly effective, clearly increasing the environmental and economic value of abandoned farmlands. Every year, 130,000 square kilometers of rainforest disappear from the face of the ...

This news release is available in German. A drunken sailor staggers onto a square with lots of streetlamps on it. Sometimes he will run into one of the lamps, change his direction and keep moving. Does the time he spends on this square depend on the number of streetlamps? The surprising answer is: no. No matter whether there is a streetlamp on every square meter or whether the distance between the lamps is large: on average, the drunken sailor will always spend the same amount of time on the square. Calculations at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) ...

Neither quantum computers nor quantum cryptography will become prevalent technologies without memory systems able to manipulate quantum information easily and effectively. The Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw has recently made inroads into popularizing quantum information technologies by creating an atomic memory with outstanding parameters and an extremely simple construction. Following years of tests in physics laboratories, the first quantum technologies are slowly emerging into wider applications. One example is quantum cryptography - an encryption ...

The ocean is undergoing global changes at a remarkable pace and we must change with it to attain our best possible future ocean, warns the head of The University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute. One of the global leaders in ocean science, Professor Carlos Duarte has shared his insights on the future of the world's oceans in a paper published in the international open-access journal Frontiers in Marine Science. In the paper Professor Duarte explains the grand challenge researchers face in addressing global change and the future state of the ocean. "The ocean ...

This news release is available in German. Just four months after the final data package from the GOCE satellite mission was delivered, researchers are laying out a rich harvest of scientific results, with the promise of more to come. A mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) provided the most accurate measurements yet of Earth's gravitational field. The GOCE Gravity Consortium, coordinated by the Technische Universität München (TUM), produced all of the mission's data products including ...

The value of a piece of chocolate cake can change. Someone who happens to be on a diet is more likely to choose a fruit dessert and judge the calorie-laden cake as unhealthy. Previous studies have shown that a specific network in the brain is active when a person must decide between various choices that vary depending on context. They emphasize the interaction between neurons in two brain areas of the prefrontal cortex - the controlling area on the front side of the brain. Prefrontal cortex shows increased activity in all decisions Sarah Rudorf and Todd Hare of the ...

On 24 October 2014, Sweden called off the hunt for a submarine after a week-long underwater search in the Stockholm archipelago. Triggered by a reported sighting of a Russian submarine, the alleged 'invasion' had been widely anticipated by military specialists and the media. "Our assessment is that in the inner archipelago there was a plausible foreign underwater operation," Rear Adm. Anders Grenstad commented, "But we believe that what has violated Swedish waters has left." "Whatever was there could not have been a conventional submarine," Grenstad said, but a "craft ...

This news release is available in Japanese. The deep ocean seems so remote that it is difficult to imagine any sort of human-generated change making an impact on deep-sea life. It is even more difficult to collect or examine evidence from the deep ocean to determine what those impacts might be. Enter the barnacle; a hard, sessile creature that looks like a tiny volcano and attaches to rocks, boat bottoms, and other hard substrates, where it filters ocean water to feed on tiny organisms. The barnacle holds clues about how climate change is affecting the deep ocean. ...

KNOXVILLE - Warfare not only hastened human technological progress and vast social and political changes, but may have greatly contributed to the evolutionary emergence of humans' high intelligence and ability to work together toward common goals, according to a new study from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS). How humans evolved high intelligence, required for complex collaborative activities, despite the various costs of having a big brain has long puzzled evolutionary biologists. While the human brain represents only about two ...

Published in the journal Nature, the discovery could revolutionise fuel cells and other hydrogen-based technologies as they require a barrier that only allow protons - hydrogen atoms stripped off their electrons - to pass through. In addition, graphene membranes could be used to sieve hydrogen gas out of the atmosphere, where it is present in minute quantities, creating the possibility of electric generators powered by air. One-atom thick material graphene, first isolated and explored in 2004 by a team at The University of Manchester, is renowned for its barrier properties, ...

NGC 3532 is a bright open cluster located some 1300 light-years away in the constellation of Carina(The Keel of the ship Argo). It is informally known as the Wishing Well Cluster, as it resembles scattered silver coins which have been dropped into a well. It is also referred to as the Football Cluster, although how appropriate this is depends on which side of the Atlantic you live. It acquired the name because of its oval shape, which citizens of rugby-playing nations might see as resembling a rugby ball. This very bright star cluster is easily seen with the naked eye ...

Jülich, 26 November 2014 - In metals such as copper or aluminium, so-called conduction electrons are able to move around freely, in the same way as particles in a gas or a liquid. If, however, impurities are implanted into the metal's crystal lattice, the electrons cluster together in a uniform pattern around the point of interference, resembling the ripples that occur when a stone is thrown into a pool of water. Scientists in Jülich have, with the help of computer simulations, now discovered a combination of materials that strengthens these Friedel oscillations ...

The Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) has succeeded for the first time in describing the complex relationships within an ecosystem in unprecedented detail. For their work, carried out in collaboration with US and Luxembourg partners, their model ecosystem was a "biological wastewater treatment plant". In it live numerous species of bacteria which are involved in the wastewater purification process. LCSB director Prof. Dr. Rudi Balling stresses the medical importance of these research efforts: "Bacterial ecosystems also play a major role in our health. ...

Although the van der Waals force was discovered around 150 years ago, it is still difficult to quantify when predicting the behaviour of solids, liquids, and molecules. Precise measurements were only possible up to now for single atoms or macroscopic objects. However, the van der Waals forces are particularly important at intermediate size, where they crucially co-determine the behaviour of complex molecules, such as biomolecules and proteins. They are also responsible for the functioning of certain adhesives and are the reason why geckos can adhere so amazingly well to ...

This news release is available in French. The way people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) gather information - not the judgement process itself - might explain why they gain different perceptions from peoples' faces, according to a new study from Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies and the University of Montreal. "The evaluation of an individual's face is a rapid process that influences our future relationship with the individual," said Baudouin Forgeot d'Arc, lead author of the study. "By studying these judgments, we wanted to better understand how people with ...