Showing 20 articles starting at article 481

< Previous 20 articles        Next 20 articles >

Categories: Biology: Botany, Physics: Optics

Return to the site home page

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Physicists propose a novel way to create photoconductive circuits, where the circuit is directly patterned onto a glass surface with femtosecond laser light. The new technology may one day be useful for harvesting energy, while remaining transparent to light and using a single material.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Data gathered through years of observation reveal an innocuous-seeming ant is disrupting an ecosystem in East Africa, illustrating the complex web of interactions among ants, trees, lions, zebras and buffaloes.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

The intricate dance of nature often unfolds in mysterious ways, hidden from the naked eye. At the heart of this enigmatic tango lies a vital partnership: the symbiosis between plants and a type of fungi known as arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. New groundbreaking research delves into this partnership, revealing key insights that deepen our understanding of plant-AM fungi interactions and could lead to advances in sustainable agriculture.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

European forests with a greater diversity of tree species are more resilient to storms, according to new research.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Certain materials have desirable properties that are hidden and scientists can use light to uncover these properties. Researchers have used an advanced optical technique, based on terahertz time-domain spectroscopy, to learn more about a quantum material called Ta2NiSe5 (TNS).

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Researchers grew a twisted multilayer crystal structure for the first time and measured the structure's key properties. The twisted structure could help researchers develop next-generation materials for solar cells, quantum computers, lasers and other devices.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

The way trees grow together do not resemble how branches grow on a single tree, scientists have discovered.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Plants produce a range of chemicals known as volatile organic compounds that influence their interactions with the world around them. In a new study, researchers investigated how the type and amount of these VOCs change based on different features of tomato plants.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A new database of weeds that can help scientists understand how traditional agricultural systems were managed throughout history, could also provide insights into how global trends like the climate crisis could affect the resilience of our modern day food systems.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Ecologists have long known that standing dead trees, commonly referred to as snags, are an important habitat element for forest dwellers and act as a driver of biodiversity. They're so important that in some managed forests, snag creation is part of the conservation tool kit -- i.e., crews sometimes convert a percentage of live trees into dead ones through techniques ranging from sawing off their tops to wounding their trunks to injecting them with disease-causing fungi.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

An international team of researchers has disproved a previously held assumption about the impact of multiphoton components in interference effects of thermal fields (e.g. sunlight) and parametric single photons (generated in non-linear crystals).

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

With disease and high demand posing threats to the world's primary natural rubber supply in Southeast Asia, scientists are working to ramp up the U.S. rubber market by advancing methods to extract latex from two sustainable North American plant sources: a dandelion species and a desert shrub.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Of all the organisms that photosynthesize, land plants have the most complex form. How did this morphology emerge? A team of scientists has taken a deep dive into the evolutionary history of morphological complexity in streptophytes, which include land plants and many green algae. Their research allowed them to go back in time to investigate lineages that emerged long before land plants existed.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Scientists have developed 'supramolecular ink,' a new 3D-printable OLED (organic light-emitting diode) material made of inexpensive, Earth-abundant elements instead of costly scarce metals. The advance could enable more affordable and environmentally sustainable OLED flat-panel displays as well as 3D-printable wearable technologies and lighting.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

An international team of researchers has uncovered a remarkable genetic phenomenon in lycophytes, which are similar to ferns and among the oldest land plants. Their study reveals that these plants have maintained a consistent genetic structure for over 350 million years, a significant deviation from the norm in plant genetics.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A team of scientists has succeeded in cooling traveling sound waves in wave-guides considerably further than has previously been possible using laser light. This achievement represents a significant move towards the ultimate goal of reaching the quantum ground state of sound in wave-guides. Unwanted noise generated by the acoustic waves at room temperature can be eliminated. This experimental approach both provides a deeper understanding of the transition from classical to quantum phenomena of sound and is relevant to quantum communication systems and future quantum technologies.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Researchers have developed a light-based means of printing nano-sized metal structures that is 480 times faster and 35 times cheaper than the current conventional method. It is a scalable solution that could transform a scientific field long reliant on technologies that are prohibitively expensive and slow. Their method is called superluminescent light projection (SLP).

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A research group has discovered significant nonreciprocal optical absorption of LiNiPO4, referred to as the optical diode effect, in which divalent nickel (Ni2+) ions are responsible for magnetism, by passing light at shortwave infrared wavelengths used in optical communications. Furthermore, they have uncovered that it is possible to switch the optical diode effect by applying a magnetic field. This is a step forward in the development of an innovative optical isolator that is more compact and can control light propagation, replacing the conventional optical isolators with complex structures.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Organic semiconductors are materials that find applications in various electronic devices. Exciton binding energy is an important attribute that influences the behavior of these materials. Now, researchers have employed advanced spectroscopic techniques to accurately determine these energies for various organic semiconductor materials, with a high precision of 0.1 electron volts. Their study reveals unexpected correlations that are poised to shape the future of organic optoelectronics, influence design principles, and find potential applications in bio-related materials.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Scientists have known about a particular organelle in plant cells for over a century. However, scientists have only now discovered that organelle's key role in aging.