ScienceDaily: Matter & Energy News

Toward quantum chips: Packing single-photon detectors on an optical chip is crucial for quantum-computational circuits Posted: 09 Jan 2015 07:10 AM PST A team of researchers has built an array of light detectors sensitive enough to register the arrival of individual light particles, or photons, and mounted them on a silicon optical chip. Such arrays are crucial components of devices that use photons to perform quantum computations.

Chitosan: Sustainable alternative for food packaging Posted: 09 Jan 2015 05:46 AM PST A material known as chitosan, made from crustacean shells, has been used to substitute petroleum by-products in food packaging. The environment is seriously affected by the use of food packaing: plastic bottles and films are present everywhere in our civilization and take between 100 and 400 years to degrade. So the quest for alternative materials to plastics produced from petroleum is an environmental priority.

Flexible methane production from electricity and bio-mass Posted: 09 Jan 2015 01:55 AM PST Interlinkage of the power and gas grids is planned to make electricity supply sustainable and robust in the future. Fluctuating amounts of wind and solar power, for instance, might be stored in the form of the chemical energy carrier methane. Now researchers have now proved that this is technically feasible.

Making synthetic materials more impervious: fewer plastic substances in food Posted: 09 Jan 2015 01:55 AM PST Synthetic materials are convenient in many respects, but they have one disadvantage: they are permeable to gases. In order to make plastic more impervious, engineers apply wafer-thin layers on surfaces. This would not only increase the shelf life of food in plastic packaging, but would also prevent the migration of substances from the plastic into the food.

From the lab to your digital device, quantum dots have made quantum leaps Posted: 09 Jan 2015 01:51 AM PST Quantum dots have not only found their way into tablets, computer screens, and TVs, they are also used in biological and medical imaging tools, and now researchers are exploring them for solar cell as well as brain imaging applications.