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to make nanoscale diamond crystals, researchers have used their own tricks, including recipes involving carbon nanotubes.

nanodiamonds could be used as hard protective coatings in small scale systems or sensors.

At the time of the big bang, our universe may not have had exactly three dimensions of space and one of time, according to some theorists. In the 6 August Physical Review Letters, a team proposes a way to observe the postulated transition to our current universe using so-called metamaterials, structures in which the propagation of light can be precisely controlled. Experiments on such structures, they say, could test predictions that a "big flash" of radiation would accompany changes in the structure of spacetime that may have occurred in the early universe.

Lima and Vanzella joined with George Matsas of São Paulo State University in their latest work to examine a model of the highly-curved spacetime that appears during formation of an ultradense neutron star. For some reasonable values of the mass and size of the star, they predict that the vacuum energy will grow within milliseconds for some values of the coupling parameter. At this point the vacuum energy would begin to induce additional gravitational effects, which they haven't yet calculated, so they don't know how the star would be affected. If further research shows such a neutron star to be unstable, the existence of stable neutron stars of particular sizes could rule out the existence fields of the type they modeled.

A computer simulation shows the transition from "fermionic" to "liquid" light.

The possibility of sending this type of "self-focused" light pulse long distances could be important for remote sensing applications, such as LIDAR, which uses laser light the way radar uses radio waves.

The pure vacuum of a thermos is not the best possible insulator for keeping your soup warm. Last year a team found theoretically that a structure known as a photonic crystal could block heat flow even more effectively than vacuum.