A team of physicists has directly observed a reverse shock wave of light in a specially tailored structure known as a left-handed metamaterial. Although it was first predicted over forty years ago, ...

A type of light commonly observed in astrophysics experiments and nuclear reactors can help detect cancer. In a clinical trial, a prototype of an imaging machine that relies on this usually bluish ...

The familiar claim, “Nothing can go faster than light,” is, in fact, misleading. Light travels at different speeds in different media. The speed depends on the medium’s index of refraction (n). Light ...

Faint, fleeting blue flashes of radiation emitted by particles that travel faster than the speed of light through the atmosphere may help scientists solve one of the oldest mysteries in astrophysics.

Cerenkov luminescence imaging (CLI) exploits the characteristic blue light emitted when charged particles traverse a dielectric medium at speeds exceeding the phase velocity of light. This phenomenon, ...

A reader sent the following interesting questions: Question I: Why doesn't light make a sonic boom when it travels. I know its a maseless particles, but the energy in it gives it an effective mass via ...

The frozen depths of the Antarctic ice-cap might be the best place to catch high-energy neutrinos -- some of nature's most elusive particles -- new research suggests. Astronomers can use these ...

Heavy ion therapy is a promising cancer treatment technique, with beams of heavy ions delivering sharper Bragg peaks and less lateral scattering than a proton beam. But as tumour targeting gets more ...

A new intraoperative imaging technique, Cerenkov luminescence imaging (CLI), can accurately assess surgical margins during radical prostatectomy, according to a first-in-human research. The ...

A new intraoperative imaging technique, Cerenkov luminescence imaging (CLI), can accurately assess surgical margins during radical prostatectomy, according to a first-in-human research published in ...