Scientists create first acoustic metamaterial ’superlens’

September 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The American Physical Society (APS), in the latest podcast of 'Life Lines', has explained how elephant vocalizations travel through the ground for great distances, and how other elephants can understand them, just as they understand acoustic sound, which travels through the air. Research that led to the development of the content of the podcast was done by Dr Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, who is the author of 'The Elephant's Secret Sense'.

September 8th, 2009 LONDON - Doors of the 'quietist room in the world' have been thrown open to allow scientists to study nanotechnology in Bristol, UK. The architecture of the 11-million pound laboratory, that virtually has no air movement, keeps echo and sound waves from penetrating the building designed by architects Willmott Dixon South West and Wales.

September 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The United States Naval Research Laboratory is working on a new technology that uses flashes of laser light to remotely create underwater sound. Researchers behind the project say that the new technology has the potential to expand and improve both Naval and commercial underwater acoustic applications, including undersea communications, navigation, and acoustic imaging.

September 5th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has developed a new laser technology that has made it possible to turn light into sound. Developed by scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory, US, the technology has the potential to expand and improve both Naval and commercial underwater acoustic applications, including undersea communications, navigation and acoustic imaging.

August 31st, 2009 LONDON - The dentist's dreaded drill may soon be a thing of past, thanks to the laser tests University of Sydney scientists have developed to identify weaknesses in dental enamel. Currently, X-rays and metal probes are used to check cavities, but they fail to detect weaknesses in the enamel in time to repair the surface.

August 29th, 2009 WASHINGTON - While it gets quite difficult to manipulate tiny objects like single cells or nanosized beads via relatively large, unwieldy equipment, Penn State engineers have now designed a new system that uses sound as a pair of tiny tweezers that are small enough to place infinitesimal objects on a chip. While optical tweezers are large and expensive, acoustic tweezers are smaller than a dime, small enough to fabricate on a chip using standard chip manufacturing techniques.

August 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - It is now possible to bend the light along the corner of a building or even the profile of the eastern seaboard, for Boston College physicists have created a new metamaterial device that can guide electromagnetic waves around various objects. As directed by the researchers' novel device, these beams continue to behave as if travelling in a straight line.

July 17th, 2009 MELBOURNE - Scientists in Hong Kong are developing a cloak of illusion, or a material that disguises one object as another. "The metamaterial can turn the appearance of one object into that of another," says Professor Che Ting Chan, a scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and coauthor of a paper that recently appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters.

July 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of researchers at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) have come up with a device called a dc metamaterial, which makes objects invisible under certain light. The device does so, according to the researchers, under very low frequency electromagnetic waves by making the inside of the magnetic field zero, but not altering the exterior field.

June 5th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Tickling a gorilla or chimp can arouse bursts of grunting sounds - or laughter, say researchers who conclude that man's laugh can be traced back to 10 to 16 million years ago. Scientists reported the finding online on June 4th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

May 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Acoustic experts confirmed tracking a singing blue whale 112 km off the Long Island and New York City early this year, even as the second one was heard singing in the far distance. These endangered blue whales are the largest animals ever to have lived on this planet, and their voices can travel across an ocean.

April 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The painful insertion of a rigid instrument through the penis to scrape unwanted tissues lining the walnut-sized prostate gland, may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a gentler method developed by scientists. Urologist William Roberts and a team at the University of Michigan led by Ann Arbor are fine-tuning a technique to remove unwanted prostate tissue using focused pulses of ultrasound.

April 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, are developing a new technology, called histotripsy, to trim the interiors of aging prostates in the body. Traditionally, researchers treated prostate growths by inserting a rigid instrument through the penis and scraping away cells lining the walnut-sized gland.

March 18th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say that they may have developed a new tool to enhance the way computer chips, LEDs, and transistors are built by reversing a process that converts electrical signals into sounds heard out of a cell phone. The researchers claim that this is the first time that any research team have converted the highest frequency sounds into light by reversing a process that converts electrical signals to sound.

March 14th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists have created a metamaterial that could lead to the development of a cloaking device that makes a person invisible, among other applications. Developed by Naomi Halas and graduate student Nikolay Mirin from Rice University, US, the material collects light from any direction and emits it in a single direction, using very tiny, cup-shaped particles called nanocups.