T-rays at room temperature

INNOVATIONS IN LASER technology have led a team of Harvard research­ers to create the world's first electri­cally-pumped semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz (THz) radiation at room temperature.

Previously, electrically-pumped, Tera­hertz semiconductor lasers were im­practical to use, due to the significant amounts of cryogenic cooling needed to make them work properly, but the new findings could prove to be a break­through in the field of Terahertz (THz) radiation, or T -rays.

Life Found a Mile Below Sea floor

The Ocean Drilling Program obtained core samples from deep under the ocean, allowing scientists to detect extreme microbes living a kilometre or two below the sea floor. A coring sample off the coast of Newfoundland turned up single-celled microbes living in searing temperatures about 1,626 meters below the sea floor. According to R. John  Parkes, Geobiologist, Cardiff University -in Wales, "these are probably not only the deepest, but the hottest organisms found in deep marine sediments. It's

fascinating to know what proportion of our planet actually has living organisms in it." Parkes and his colleagues analysed core samples returned from the Ocean drilling Program. They found evidence for  prokaryotic cells, which lack a central nucleus, that appear to be from the archaea family, a sister domain to bacteria. The newly-discovered life likely gets its energy from methane. It thrives in 111 million-year-old rocks, enduring temperatures between 60 to 100 de­grees Celsius. There's no light around and there's no oxygen around. In this extreme environment, life is relatively. sparse.

Nano-Iron

Iron that is made up of nanoscale crys­tals are far stronger and harder than its traditional counterpart, but the benefits of this "nano-iron" have been limited by the fact that its nanocrystalline structure breaks down at relatively modest tem­peratures. According to Dr. Carl C. Koch, Professor at National Carolina State Uni­versity of materials science engineering who worked on the project, the alloy essentially consists of 1 % zirconium and 99% iron. The zirconium allows the alloy to retain its nanocrystalline structure un­der high temperatures -1,300 degrees Celsius - approaching the melting point of iron. The new alloy is also economically vi­able, since "it costs virtually the same amount to produce the alloy" as it does :0 create nano-iron.

Plastic red blood cells

Red blood cells travel through the blood­stream delivering vital oxygen to body tissues and taking away unwanted car­bon dioxide - and they have to squeeze through blood vessels as thin as 3 rni­crometres across to do it. But in some diseases, such as malaria and sickle cell disease, red blood cells lose this ability to deform.

Now, Joseph DeSimone, a chemi­cal engineer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US, has created tiny sacks of the polymer polyethylene glycol just 8 micrometres across - in the range of human red blood cells - that are capable of deforming in a way that allows them to pass through the tiniest capillaries. Polyethylene glycol is biologically benign.