Topic

This week's question concerns the issue of gene patents. While some in the scientific community believe that human genes should not be exploited for commercial gain, others argue that a patent is a reward for years of expensive research that moves science forward. What do you think? Should human genes be...

Given the current trend of reprogrammable embedded devices within the Department of Defense and industry, attention needs to be refocused on the benefits or measurability of software protection applied to this domain. Modern reconfigurable embedded systems consider circuits as software and the...

There are existing wideband communications systems that were built using field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based software-defined radio (SDR) designs. Despite the inherent advantages of these systems, some are functionally restricted by limited output bandwidth.

High-performance computing (HPC) users have traditionally relied upon two things to supply them with processing power: speed of the central processing units (CPUs) and the scalability of the system. There are problems with this approach. Physical limitations are curtailing clock speed...

The goal of this work was to develop a new class of portable optical frequency references based on sub-Doppler spectroscopy inside gas-filled, hollow-core photonic bandgap (PBG) optical fiber. The change in line width with core size, and narrower transitions inside a new “kagome” structured...

The concept of alkali lasers was first suggested by Schalow and Townes in the late 1950s. In the 1970s, photo-dissociation of several of the alkali salts produced lasers with wavelengths ranging from the visible to the far infrared. Thirty years later, diode-pumped...

A paper describes the basic design and concepts of tunable liquid-crystal polarization gratings with a nematic liquid crystal (LC) optical phase plate, with a large, continuous in- plane gradient that is variable, and its application to a beam steering device with high efficiency.