Wired reveals the weird ways nanotechnologists are making sound behave like light… this time, by creating a Star Trek weapon in the lab:

Because laser is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” these new contraptions – which exploit particles of sound called phonons – should properly be called phasers. Such devices could one day be [...]

The Economist is gazing into the pretty colors…not of quantum computers, but quantum television screens:

An LCD screen works with a backlight shining through red, blue or green filters to produce the pixels which make up an image. Many televisions use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as the backlight because they are brighter and use less power than fluorescent bulbs. Sony’s new [...]

Extreme Tech gets right to the point of a new technology – a mechanical pencil that can draw functional electronic circuits:

With MIT’s carbon nanotube pencil, the lead is formed by compressing single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT), until you have a substance that looks and behaves very similarly to graphite. The difference, though, is that drawing with MIT’s pencil actually [...]

Graphene, as we all now know, is the latest strange form of carbon to wow material scientists with its unusual properties. Well, New Scientist shows that graphene is even stranger than we thought, turning regular old electricity into ultra-focused plasmons:

When light hits some materials in just the right way, ripples of electrons called plasmons appear on the surface. These [...]

I’m getting this from Nature, although New Scientist has also been covering it. A group called “the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation International Revolutionary Front” is waging war – with guns and bombs – against nuclear researchers and nanotechnologists:

The Olga Cell, named after an imprisoned Greek anarchist, is part of the Informal Anarchist Federation, which, in April [...]

New Scientist does its best to make nanomaterials sexy… like the new silicon stuff that’s stealing carbon’s limelight:

Patrick Vogt of Berlin’s Technical University in Germany, and colleagues at Aix-Marseille University in France created silicene by condensing silicon vapour onto a silver plate to form a single layer of atoms. They then measured the optical, chemical and electronic properties [...]

PhysOrg unveils the guts of the next supercomputer breakthrough – with carbon nanotubes that, curiously, make things nearby get hot while they stay cool:

For the UMD researchers, the experience of the discovery was like what you or I might have felt, if, on a seemingly ordinary morning, we began to make breakfast, only to find certain things happening [...]

None of this “invisible to X-rays” or “invisible in the infrared” business for the University of Texas.

When they use carbon nanotubes to make something invisible, they mean you can see through it.

More here.

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Alternative energy got a big boost from TechEye.net, which reports that a new generation of solar panels could double in efficiency:

A team made of researchers from both UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz has been awarded a $1.5 million development fund by the National Science Foundation to continue work on the development.

While most conventional solar cells use the [...]