Putting Photons to Work from ScienceNOW Researchers have built a nanoscale device that vibrates when struck by incoming laser light. The contraption, which is sensitive to the energy of a single photon, could speed the development of new optical communications systems. Full Article The Man Who Found Quarks and Made Sense of the Universe from Discover Magazine It is no accident that the quark—the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you—has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. Full Article Flat Universe May be the New Flat Earth from NewScientist For centuries the ancients believed the Earth was flat. Evidence to the contrary was either ignored or effortlessly integrated into the dominant world view. Today we dismiss flat-Earthers as ignorant, yet we may be making an almost identical mistake – not about our planet, but about the entire universe. Full Article Telescopes Poised to Spot Air-Breathing Aliens from NewScientist Signs of life on planets beyond our own solar system may soon be in our sights. Experiments and calculations presented at an astrobiology meeting last week reveal how the coming generation of space telescopes will for the first time be capable of detecting "biosignatures" in the light from planets orbiting other stars. Full Article

Why Comets Are Dirty
from ScienceNOW
They don't call comets dirty snowballs for nothing. The cosmic wanderers are chock-full of fine dust particles not unlike those found in cigarette smoke. It turns out that stars are to blame. Solar wind and radiation push dust out into space, where it mixes in with the ice crystals that form comets, new research reveals. Full Article

German Scientists Find Clues to Roman Mass Production
from Earth Times
German scientists disclosed Friday new evidence that the ancient Romans used mass-production methods to make metalwares at lesser cost, just like modern factories do. A close study of a 28-centimetre-tall bronze figure of the god Mercury made in the 2nd century AD showed it was hollow - an indication of cost cutting - and that its legs were made separately, indicating some kind of assembly line to exploit economies of scale. Full Article

Trapping Space Ghosts
from The Columbus Dispatch
They're born of exploding stars and violent cosmic collisions, neutrinos streak through space -- and planets -- at the speed of light. You can't see them, and they pass through matter, making them among the slipperiest subatomic particles the cosmos hurls at Earth. Full Article

Mapping the Universe with Helium
from Scientific American
Cosmologists talk about the cosmic microwave background radiation, their snapshot of the universe at the tender age of 400,000 years, so much that it might seem pretty well mined out by now. After all, the European Space Agency intends for its new Planck satellite to extract "essentially all the information available" in the radiation's spatial patterns. Full Article

Some 'Star Trek' Gizmos No Longer Futuristic
from The San Francisco Chronicle via The Journal Gazette
Forty years after the original "Star Trek" series was canceled, warp drives and transporter beams remain more science fiction than fact. But some of "Star Trek's" 23rd-century gadgets, such as hand-held medical scanners, language translators and high-tech weaponry, are becoming a reality in the 21st century. Full Article