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Earthquake simulator for homes, ultrasounds assess quakes, jelly earthquake models from the American Institute of Physics.

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Ocean research instruments improve forecasts; tornadoes come from hurricanes; hurricane damage scale; ocean plankton and hurricanes; hurricane resistant glass for homes.

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How many backflips can a motocross biker do in the X Games? The American Physical Society says: limit is four.

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Low-intensity electric fields can disrupt the division of cancer cells and slow the growth of brain tumors, suggest laboratory experiments and a small human trial, raising hopes that electric fields will become a new weapon for stalling the progression of cancer. The August 2007 issue of Physics Today describes the mechanisms by which the electric fields do their work.

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The five-member high-school-aged US Physics Team, sponsored by the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Institute of Physics, earned two gold and three silver medals at the International Physics Olympiad.

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By borrowing techniques used in telecommunications technology, computed tomography (CT) scanners may eventually see data collection speeds increase by hundreds of times, leading to better images, faster imaging procedures, and potentially lower x-ray exposures.

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Using innovative physics, researchers have proposed a system that may one day bring proton therapy, a state-of-the-art cancer treatment method currently available only at a handful of centers, to radiation treatment centers and cancer patients everywhere.

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Scientists at Yokohama National University in Japan have built a highly efficient room-temperature nanometer-scale laser that produces stable, continuous streams of near-infrared laser light. Using only a microwatt of power, this nanolaser design should be useful in future miniaturized circuits containing optical devices.

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Forget about cooking classes--forks, knives, and spoons can provide a rich lesson in physics.

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In efforts that may improve diagnoses of many eye diseases, optics researchers will introduce a new type of laser for providing high-resolution 3-D images of the retina.

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The proposed US missile defense shield system in Europe is an unproven defense against a long-range ballistic missile attack, says a leading physicist who has studied missile defense systems. The existing system has been tested fewer than a dozen times.

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Researchers in Italy have created an ultrashort light pulse--a single isolated burst of extreme-ultraviolet light that lasts for only 130 billionths of a billionth of a second. The achievement will help scientists understand and control extremely rapid processes involving electrons in atoms and molecules.

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In an advance that can potentially assist cancer diagnosis, a new optical technique provides high-resolution, three-dimensional images of blood vessels by taking advantage of the natural multiple-photon-absorbing properties of hemoglobin.

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In efforts that can improve studies of biological objects and the construction of nanotech materials, researchers at the University of California-Berkeley have invented "optoelectronic tweezers," a new way of controlling nanometer-scale objects. The research will be presented at the upcoming CLEO/QELS meeting in Baltimore.

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At the upcoming CLEO/QELS meeting in Baltimore, an MIT-Sandia team will demonstrate the first real-time terahertz imaging system that obtains images from 25 meters away.

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A new technology has been developed that could help prevent gun tragedies, especially when a gun is used by someone other than the gun's licensed owner.

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The average U.S. resident is exposed to nearly six times as much radiation from medical devices than in 1980, according to preliminary results of a study done by the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements (NCRP).

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By combining two techniques, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and near-infrared optics, researchers at Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Medical School may have devised a new, potentially more accurate method for diagnosing breast cancer.

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Acoustical Society of America (ASA) sponsors two annual awards for outstanding science writing one by a professional scientist and one by a journalist. This year's deadline is April 2.

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A new light source based on fiber-optic technology promises to improve the inspection of food, produce, paper, currency, recyclables and other products. New research revealing this technology will be presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC), being held March 25-29 in Anaheim, Calif.

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Hearing loss puts farmers at higher risk for suffering an injury at work, according to a new University of Iowa study that will be released today at the National Hearing Conservation Association's 32nd annual conference.

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A researcher at a national hearing conference will present data that predict 17 percent of people exposed to deployed airbags in American cars will suffer from permanent hearing loss. His data also show airbag deployment is more hazardous to the ear when a car's windows are rolled down than when they are rolled up.

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Each year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards its Scientific and Technical Achievement awards to the scientists and engineers that have designed and developed technologies that contribute to the progress of the film industry. Software for digital imaging that made the creepy images from 'Pirates of the Caribbean', a truly useful wireless movie-camera system, and film archiving techniques take home the statuette this Saturday.

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Tomorrow will be an important day in the history of humankind's battle against global warming, says a science historian at the American Institute of Physics. "For the first time, society is taking scientific predictions like this seriously. We should congratulate ourselves for not only paying attention but taking serious action."

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Scientists at Monash University in Australia have developed a process for rapidly and efficiently separating blood plasma at the microscopic level without any moving parts, potentially allowing doctors to do blood tests without sending samples to a laboratory. The technique employs the same principle that Einstein explained when observing the separation of tea leaves in a stirred teacup.

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More U.S. high-school students are taking physics than ever before, and the number of physics bachelor's degree recipients in the nation has increased 31 percent since 2000, according to new data presented today by the American Institute of Physics (AIP). In addition, physics bachelor's degree recipients are eight times more likely to go on to earn any kind of PhD than those with non-physics bachelor's, the new data show.

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H. Frederick Dylla has been selected to be the next Executive Director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), a not-for-profit organization which publishes scientific journals and provides a wide range of services for individual scientists, students, the general public, and its ten Member Societies devoted to physics and related sciences.

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The discovery that atoms are held together by looser forces than expected is the top physics story of the year, according to the editors of Physics News Update, the weekly bulletin of research news published by the American Institute of Physics.

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Ray Charles was really good at snapping, says musical acoustician Kenneth Lindsay of Southern Oregon University in Ashland. According to a new computer analysis, Charles's snaps that open his famous song "Fever" with Natalie Cole are timed so well that he is never more than 5 milliseconds off the tight beat, a new study shows.

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South Korean researchers have designed and built an inexpensive optical lens that collects light from a large area and produces a virtually distortion-free wide-angle image. Standing in contrast to commonly known "fisheye" lenses, which produce significant amounts of visual distortion, low-distortion wide-angle lenses can potentially improve image-based applications such as indoor security-camera systems and robot navigation.

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A new type of stethoscope enables doctors to hear the sounds of the body in extremely loud situations, such as during the transportation of wounded soldiers in Blackhawk helicopters.

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Recharging your laptop computer -- and also your cell phone and a variety of other gadgets -- might one day be doable in the same convenient way many people now surf the Web: wirelessly. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team will present research on the physics of electromagnetic fields, showing how wireless energy could power future gadgets.

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A new lab-on-a-chip that can identify single bacterial cells for the most common cases of drug-resistant pneumonia, cutting down the wait from days to hours for emergency treatment.

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Pioneered almost 300 years ago by Benjamin Franklin, the basic science of electrostatics has generated recent advances that could soon lead to color laser printers that are cheaper and up to 70 percent smaller than current models, a physicist reports at this week's AVS International Symposium and Exhibition in San Francisco.

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The science behind a few holiday gifts for the geek on your list.

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Waves traveling at about 99.997% the speed of light seen for the first time ever and recorded on film.

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Students strive to reduce noise-induced hearing loss from personal stereo systems and concerts by inventing projects that detect risky sound levels in music players, and by analyzing their peers' attitudes and beliefs regarding loud noise and their hearing.

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At the first-ever conference dedicated to understanding and preventing noise-induced hearing loss in children, researchers will present the first-ever detailed guidelines on safe volume levels for listening to the Apple iPod portable music player with earphones.

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Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia can now detect the spread of skin cancer cells through the blood by literally listening to their sound. The unprecedented, minimally invasive technique causes melanoma cells to emit noise, and could let oncologists spot early signs of metastases -- as few as ten cancer cells in a blood sample -- before they even settle in other organs.

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Physicist Kenneth Libbrecht's snowflake images have gotten stuck--on a stamp. Last week the United States Postal Service issued four new 39-cent commemorative postage stamps based on Libbrecht's high-resolution microscope images of snowflakes.

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Physicists with technologies to identify furtive nuclear tests and geophysicists who know about nuclear test detection via seismology are available for comment.

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A new technique sends secret messages under other people's noses so cleverly that it would impress James Bond--yet the procedure is so firmly rooted in the real world that it can be instantly used with existing equipment and infrastructure.

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In an effort to provide safer and more reliable components for aircraft, researchers have invented an optical on-off switch that can replace electrical wiring on airplanes with fiber optics for controlling elevators, rudders, and other flight-critical elements. The technology also has potential applications on the nation's highways, as a "weigh-in-motion" sensor for measuring the weight of fast-moving commercial trucks without requiring them to stop on a scale.

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The Optical Society of America's 90th annual meeting, Frontiers in Optics 2006, will feature innovations and solutions based on optical sciences. It is a joint meeting with a laser sciences group which will also present timely research and discoveries in laser science.

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Scientists have unveiled a new technology that could lead to video displays that faithfully reproduce a fuller range of colors than current models, giving a life-like viewing experience. The invention, based on fine-tuning light using microscopic artificial muscles, could turn into consumer products in eight years, the scientists say.

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By studying how a single electron behaves inside an electronic bottle, Harvard physicists were able to calculate (six times more precisely than the previous measurements) a new value for a number called the fine structure constant, which specifies the strength of the electromagnetic force, which holds electrons inside atoms.

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Super-intense radiation delivered by a robotic arm eradicated lung tumors in some human patients just 3-4 months after treatment, medical physicist Cihat Ozhasoglu, Ph.D. of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center will report in early August at the 48th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine in Orlando.

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To help computers provide faster "second opinions" on mammogram images showing suspicious-looking breast masses, medical physicists at Duke University are employing a Google-like approach that retrieves useful information from an existing mammogram database within three seconds.

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Every U.S. student sent to the 2006 International Physics Olympiad held this year in Nanyang University in Singapore, will bring home a medal, and four of those are gold.

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A Scanner Darkly, opening in theaters nationwide today, uses old techniques in a new way to make other-worldly effects pop on the picture screen. Thanks to advances in digital technology and an old animation process called rotoscoping, moviemakers can make motion picture film or video of real, live actors appear as dreamlike as an animation classic.