Blog

MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers have devised a way to image biopsy samples with much higher resolution — an advance that could help doctors develop more accurate and inexpensive diagnostic tests. The new technique relies on an approach known...

Accurate imaging of the structures within biological tissues is vital in many clinical contexts, but the inherent scattering properties of the tissue makes deep and clear imaging problematic. One solution is to make the tissues optically transparent, and a range...

Researchers have developed a fast and practical molecular-scale imaging technique that could let scientists view never-before-seen dynamics of biological processes involved in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis. The new technique reveals a sample’s chemical makeup as...

Scientists have created new types of 2D nanostructured surfaces which appear as realistic 3D objects – including shading and shadows – using nano-engineering techniques. When light hits an object, the colour, texture and shape of that object affect how the...

In today’s increasingly powerful electronics, tiny materials are a must as manufacturers seek to increase performance without adding bulk. Smaller also is better for optoelectronic devices – like camera sensors or solar cells – which collect light and convert it...

Shortly after lasers were first developed in the 1960s, LiDAR—whose name originated as a combination of “light” and “radar” – capitalized on the newly unique precision they offered for measuring both time and distance. LiDAR quickly became the standard method...

LED chips play many important parts in information display technology, including supplying illumination for LCDs. They are the bright, compact subpixels of digital signboards and video walls that increasingly dominate streetscapes and public spaces, and have recently become the basis...

Science fiction is full of fanciful devices that allow light to interact forcefully with matter, from light sabers to photon-drive rockets. In recent years, science has begun to catch up; some results hint at interesting real-world interactions between light and...

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become invaluable to medical imaging over the past quarter century – the same length of time that scientists have been wrestling with the technique’s inherent speckle noise. Now a team at Stanford University, USA, has...

A new and more efficient way of detecting light and matter interactions at the atomic level has been discovered that could lead to advances in the emerging field of two-dimensional materials; it could also potentially lead to new ways of...