The Daily Croissant

Libya (Arabic: ‏ليبيا‎ Lībyā) is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. Bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Libya faces Egypt to the east, Sudan to the south east, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west.  

As a result of the 2011 Libyan civil war, there are currently two entities claiming to be the de jure governing authority in Libya. The institutions led by Muammar Gaddafi refer to the Libyan state as the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and are based in Sirte. The Tripoli-based National Transitional Council, led by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, controls most of the country and uses the short-form name Libya for the Libyan state, but has also on occasion referred to it in the long-form as the Libyan Republic.. Within the United Nations, Libya under Gaddafi was officially known as the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya."

Establishing scientific truth by legislative fiat.

The very notion of legislatively changing a mathematical constant sounds so crazy that it just has to be an urban legend, right? Nope. As unbelievable as it sounds, a bill that would have effectively redefined pi as 3.2 came up before the Indiana legislature in 1897.

Read more of this interesting development via mentalfloss.com

Electron micrograph of an array of gold antennas on a silicon surface. The array is created by repeating the sequence in yellow across the entire surface. Each antenna has a thickness of 50 nanometers (50 billionths of a meter). The scale bar is in microns, its length slightly shorter than a ten-thousandth of an inch. Image courtesy of Nanfang Yu.

An array of nanoscale resonators, much thinner than a wavelength, creates a constant gradient across the surface of the silicon. In this visualization, the light ray hits the surface perpendicularly, from below. The resonators on the left hold the energy slightly longer than those on the right, so the wavefront (red line) propagates at an angle. Without the array, it would be parallel to the surface. Image courtesy of Nanfang Yu.

06 September 2011

Exploiting a novel technique called phase discontinuity, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction.

"By incorporating a gradient of phase discontinuities across the interface, the laws of reflection and refraction become designer laws, and a panoply of new phenomena appear," says Zeno Gaburro, a visiting scholar in Capasso's group who was co-principal investigator for this work. "The reflected beam can bounce backward instead of forward. You can create negative refraction. There is a new angle of total internal reflection."

Moreover, the frequency (color), amplitude (brightness), and polarization of the light can also be controlled, meaning that the output is in essence a designer beam.

The researchers have already succeeded at producing a vortex beam (a helical, corkscrew-shaped stream of light) from a flat surface. They also envision flat lenses that could focus an image without aberrations.