High-precision map of Milky Way's magnetic fields

The sky map of the Faraday effect caused by the magnetic fields of the Milky Way. Red and blue colors indicate regions of the sky where the magnetic field points toward and away from the observer, respectively. The band of the Milky Way (the plane of the Galactic disk) extends horizontally in this panoramic view. The center of the Milky Way lies in the middle of the image. The North celestial pole is at the top left and the South Pole is at the bottom right. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) are part of an international team that has pooled their radio observations into a database, producing the highest precision map to date of the magnetic field within our own Milky Way galaxy.

Ultimate Energy Efficiency

In magnetic contrast images (top) taken by the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the bright spots are nanomagnets with their north ends pointing down (represented by red bar below) and the dark spots are north-up nanomagnets (blue). The six nanomagnets form a majority logic gate transistor, where the output on the right of the center bar is determined by the majority of three inputs on the top, left and bottom. Horizontal neighboring magnets tend to point in alternate directions, while vertical neighbors prefer to point in the same direction. Credit: Jeffrey Bokor lab, UC Berkeley

Magnetic memory and logic could achieve ultimate energy efficiency
Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers.
in PhysOrg

Magnetic properties of proton directly observed

Magnetic properties of a single proton directly observed for the first time
German researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM), together with their colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg and the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, have observed spin quantum-jumps with a single trapped proton for the first time. The fact that they have managed to procure this elusive data means that they have overtaken their research competitors at the elite Harvard University and are now the global leaders in this field.
font: PhysOrg