Photonics Technology Helps Shrink Telescopes
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- Written by Andy Fell
- Category: Latest News
Davis, California - For hundreds of years, the general design of an optical telescope has remained pretty much the same. Even if you’re looking at the stars with the naked eye, the image-forming process works in a similar way. Both methods collect light from an object and refract that light to form an image.
Stanford researcher creates method to measure resource tradeoffs in times of drought
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- Written by Paige Miller
- Category: Latest News
Stanford, California - Sri Lanka's Mahaweli River is the country's lifeblood. When the river is flowing well, it powers dams and irrigates rice paddy systems to support many of the country's 20 million residents. But in times of drought, the country must manage difficult tradeoffs between energy and food production.
Self-stacking nanogrids
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- Written by Larry Hardesty
- Category: Latest News
Cambridge, Massachusetts - Since the 1960s, computer chips have been built using a process called photolithography. But in the past five years, chip features have gotten smaller than the wavelength of light, which has required some ingenious modifications of photolithographic processes. Keeping up the rate of circuit miniaturization that we’ve come to expect - as predicted by Moore’s Law - will eventually require new manufacturing techniques.
Sensible clean technology subsidies
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- Written by Peter Dizikes
- Category: Latest News
Cambridge, Massachusetts - Governments often offer subsidies to consumers for clean-technology products, from home solar panels to electric vehicles. But what are the right levels of subsidy, and how should they be calculated? As a new paper co-authored by MIT researchers shows, governments can easily make subsidies too low when they ignore a basic problem: Consumer demand for these products is usually highly uncertain.
Physicists control electrons at femtosecond timescales
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- Written by Jennifer Chu
- Category: Latest News
Cambridge, Massachusetts - When you shine a light on a conducting surface like silicon or graphene, that light jump-starts certain electrons into high-energy states and kicks off a cascade of interactions that happens faster than the blink of an eye. Within just a few femtoseconds - a thousand trillionth of a second - these energized electrons can scatter among other electrons like balls on a billiard table, quickly dissipating energy in an ultrafast process known as thermalization.
Switchable material could enable new memory chips
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- Written by David L. Chandler
- Category: Latest News
Cambridge, Massachusetts - Two MIT researchers have developed a thin-film material whose phase and electrical properties can be switched between metallic and semiconducting simply by applying a small voltage. The material then stays in its new configuration until switched back by another voltage. The discovery could pave the way for a new kind of “nonvolatile” computer memory chip that retains information when the power is switched off, and for energy conversion and catalytic applications.
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