A leap into quantum computing: research from Stanford University details how huge amounts of information could be processed by a ‘supercomputer’ that uses light

New evidence from the forests of Brazil sheds light on glowing mushrooms…

Sound and Vision from Thursday’s Lit Up Fringe event

Join Imperial researchers and student societies as they bring the science of light out of the shadows for an evening of light entertainment

As part of the International Year of Light, an image showing insect trails around a floodlight

Circadian rhythms run the biological world like clockwork. Madeleine Hurry explains how they work, from the genes in a bacterium to the human brain

Themes of the last fortnight have been GM crops, the circadian eye and stem cell bath doubts …

The first wave of retinal prosthetics can return some sensation to the eyes of blind people. But in future could we restore realistic vision …

It’s the physical processes of refraction, reflection and constructive interference that create the explosion of colour in this giant bubble …

Think lightsabres are only possible in a galaxy far, far away? If we replace the photons with plasma, they may not be so out of reach…

Scientists have created a Star Trek style tractor beam (but it’s very small) …

‘Time cloaks’ not only sound cool, but also offer exciting new technological possibilities…

The idea of invisibility cloaking – being able to hide things from view – has been a point of interest to humans for thousands of years. Plato wrote in The Republic about The Ring of Gyges which allowed the wearer to become invisible. Within nature there are many different species of creatures that have evolved […]

With the New Year comes the inevitable question of resolutions – how will you better yourself in 2012? The familiar answers of getting fit, losing weight, saving money and the like are a bit jaded, although surprisingly resolutions have been proven to make a huge difference to how we accomplish our desired goals. With this […]

Harald Haas and his team from the University of Edinburgh have invented what he calls “speaking light”. In a TED talk on 15 July, Haas demonstrated the wireless transmission of HD video via a rapidly blinking desk lamp. The trick involves quickly modulating the intensity of “high-brightness” LEDs, allowing binary-encoded data to be sent to […]

The most recent financial crisis caused by the housing bubble, which popped as subprime mortgages in the US and many Western European countries defaulted, has been having dramatic consequences in many aspects of Western Europe and US economies such as high rate of unemployment and economical policies based on ”cut if you can”. Stock market […]

It’s 3am. The cold light of my computer screen illuminates my face, highlighting the bags that are forming under my eyes and casting disturbing shadows around my bedroom. You might think that I was engaged in something incredibly important to keep me up so late. But no, the truth is, I am unable to sleep […]

Although I am a massive fan of all this warm weather and cloudless sky, the inevitable rise in the pollen count does tend to put a downer on this time of year. However, this year I seem to be escaping the usually debilitating side effects of hay fever. I am, however, not quite as smug […]

Take yourself into the middle of nowhere and hold a radio receiver to the sky.  Above the snapcracklepop of static, you might just be lucky enough to catch a whistler. Sounding like weaponry from an early sci-fi film, whistlers are the remnants of lightning strikes that have travelled tens of thousands of miles through space […]

5. The ultrasound gun The sonic devastator Imagine the sound of fingernails scraping down a blackboard, then amplify it to 130 decibels (which is equivalent to a jet plane taking off) and you begin to understand how the Sonic Devastator got its name. Designed for riot control, the hand-held gun’s design restricts its beam to […]

The way we perceive the world is inevitably shaped by the models created in our brains. As a species, we have evolved to understand the world in such a way as to maximise our survival chances out on the African savannah plains of the Pleistocene and this has inevitably had consequences in defining that which […]