Researchers at ARC Center of Excellence for Quantum Atom Optics, Research School of Physics, ANU, have successfully guided supercooled Helium atoms through an optical guide made of a laser beam. This is the first ever successful at guiding matter waves.

A team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, collaborated with another team from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, to create a transistor, which is just an atomic diameter in size and can be switched on and off by just one or two electrons. These transistors can further be used as solid state devices, such as fast quantum processors (which might replace the current Si processors) and extremely dense memory devices.

A brand new method to measure gravity and minute quantizations in a gravitational field that uses neutrons entrapped between two vibrating parallel plates immersed in a gravitational field have been developed by scientists at the University of Technology, Vienna (TU Vienna). Neutrons have been earlier used for electromagnetic (EM) field measurements, but similar methods are now being used to measure gravity, force which is 10-36 times (i.e. one in a billion billion billion billion parts) as strong as the EM force.

WHO sounded alarm bells about Anti Microbial Resistance (AMR) this past World Health Day on April 7th and the warning is not early. This was writ large for a long time. Excessive prescription of antibiotics and, that too, in high doses are making microbes change faster than the speed of drug research. WHO warned of an imminent ‘pre-antibiotic age’, when we will be stuck with a large number of different, but ineffectual, antibiotics.

Researchers from Australia and Japan have recently reported a successful attempt at quantum teleportation of a complex quantum system from a certain point A to another point B without losing information. This leads to the possibility of achieving fast, high-fidelity transmission of huge chunks of data, all at once, thus revolutionizing the current data transportation scenario and providing a boost to the ongoing research on quantum computers.

The situation at the Fukushima Dai’chi nuclear power plant of Japan has just been reported to be worse than previously estimated, but still nowhere close to Chernobyl. A couple of days back, on 12th April, the Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency reviewed the situation and updated their previous rating of 5 to a maximum of 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INRES).

South Korean pop sensation Rain leads the TIME 100 poll one day before it closes on 14th April. Within a few more hours, he may, in his second appearance on this illustrious list, win the title and thus leave in his following many an illustrious figure like Beyoncé, Chris Colfer, Christopher Hitchens and Barack Obama.

IBM on Tuesday, 12th April, announced that they have made the world’s fastest graphene transistor and also hinted at the fact that they might go into commercial production very soon. This is major news to the hardware industry, as graphene might revolutionize the current semi-conductor industry scenario. Graphene may even be good enough to replace silicon, the standard material used in all of today’s semi-conductor devices.

It has been variously billed as ‘The Final Frontier’, ‘The Great Unknown’ and ‘The Heavens’. It has enthralled humans since the caveman days. It is mysterious; it is attractive. On 12th April, 1961, space was conquered by a man called Yuri Gagarin, aka “The Columbus of the Cosmos”. Today, 50 years ago, took place the first manned space-flight.

A bill that has the potential to shield teachers and education policy makers, who refrain from teaching evolution and global warming in classes, was passed by the state of Tennessee on Thursday. This has got to be good news for the people on the extreme right, predominantly Creationists, who have earlier wanted legal protection for their ideas. The bill was passed by the house by a vote of 70-23.

This is big, really big! This may be the biggest news to hit the particle physics world in the the last 50 years. Scientists, analyzing the data collected at the Tevatron, Fermilab, have detected an anomaly that could well spell a new dawn in theoretical physics and change the Standard Model as we know it now. The observation was a bump in the data, but in the ‘wrong’ place.

All major experiments in high energy physics being done today, like the one at LHC, bear their very existence to this one experiment. In 1911, Rutherford, along with his students Geiger and Marsden, practically established a phenomenon called scattering as the foremost method of probing the internal structure of a certain substance.

The troubled Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima Dai’chi is dumping radioactive materials in the neighboring sea so as to dispose of it. This has raised a few alarms, but there is not much to worry about right at this moment.

Science is a model of reality, not reality itself. It tries to approximate reality as closely as possible. However, ‘If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong’.

Whether you want to conduct a borax bead test, perform the flame test or just heat something to red hot state, the Bunsen burner is your steady companion. It is the device so ubiquitous in a chemistry lab that people just don’t talk about it. It’s a trusty friend, whose absence is more suffered than its presence felt.