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UChicago hasthis been able for the first time conduct an experiment shows the behavior of quantum materials in curved space. In their own words, “We are beginning to make our photons interact with each other. This opens up many possibilities, such as making crystalline or exotic quantum liquid states of light. We can then see how they respond to spatial curvature.”

Interplay of light, matter is of potential technological interestQuantum Hall state

These false-color images represent the quantum Hall state that UChicago physicists created by shining infrared laser light at specially configured mirrors. Achieving this state with light instead of matter was an important step in developing computing and other applications from quantum phenomena. Courtesy of Nathan Schine, Albert Ryou, Andrey Gromov, Ariel Sommer, and Jonathan Simon.

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The rise of big data and advances in information technology has serious implications for our ability to deliver sufficient bandwidth to meet the growing demand.

Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) are looking at alternative sources that will be able to take over where traditional optical communications systems are likely to fail in future.

In their latest research, published online today (10 June 2016) in the scientific journal, Scientific Reports, the team from South Africa and Tunisia demonstrate over 100 patterns of used in an optical communication link, potentially increasing the of by 100 times.

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The next version of the Bluetooth standard is called Bluetooth 5, and will be formally announced next week, Bluetooth Special Interest Group executive director Mark Powell has revealed. Bluetooth 5 is expected to be a significant upgrade over the current version of the wireless standard, offering double the range and four times the speed of current low-energy Bluetooth transmissions, but the Bluetooth SIG says it will also offer much more support for connectionless services — things like beacons that can help people navigate inside buildings or out in the open.

The roadmap for the next version of Bluetooth was sketched out last year, but the SIG — which has tech giants like Apple, Intel, and Microsoft as backers — will officially lift the lid on Bluetooth 5 on June 16th in London. The group explains that it chose the name to simplify its marketing and make the wireless standard easier to understand for users. That change should be beneficial as our homes get smarter and more connected, with many Internet-of-Things devices relying on Bluetooth to connect to your control devices, and each other.

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Researchers at the University of Manchester, UK have made the first autonomous chemically powered synthetic small-molecule motor. The new device, which is very much like the protein motors found in biological cells, might be used to design artificial molecular machines similar to those found in nature. Such machines could be important for applications such as synthetic muscles, nano- and micro-robots and advanced mechanical motors.

READ MORE ON IOP | NANOTECHWEB

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[Via Satellite 06–009-2016] NASA has awarded The Aerospace Corporation a grant to investigate the possibility of developing an extremely thin spacecraft that would wrap around debris and remove it from Earth’s orbit. The concept, called Brane Craft, is a 1-square meter spacecraft that is less than half the thickness of a human hair. The Brane Craft would only weigh about 50 grams, significantly less than even a standard CubeSat weight of about 1 kg. The 30-micron-thick spacecraft would have a very high thrust-to-weight ratio, and would be capable of travelling long distances, which opens up other possibilities beyond just the removal of space debris.

“The Brane Craft concept is based on the one-dimensional compression of a complete spacecraft and upper stage into an essentially two-dimensional object in order to maximize power-to-weight and aperture-to-weight ratios,” said Siegfried Janson, Aerospace Corporation’s senior scientist of the microsatellite systems department and the lead investigator on the project.

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