Washington, March 20 : Scientists at the University of Illinois have moved a step closer to realising higher speed electronics and higher performance electrical and optical integrated circuits, for they have successfully created a microwave signal mixer made from a tunnel-junction transistor laser.

The researchers have revealed that their mixing device accepts two electrical inputs, and produces an optical signal that was measured at frequencies of up to 22.7 gigahertz.

Washington, March 20 : New pictures have revealed that mysterious “corkscrew” waves appear to be pushing heat from the sun’s surface to its outer atmosphere, which could help solve the mystery of how the sun is able to heat its atmosphere to millions of degrees hotter than its surface.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the pictures were taken with the help of the Swedish Solar Telescope in the Canary Islands.

The telescope was used to watch the motion of bright spots in the sun’s atmosphere that correspond to the release of millions of degrees of heat.

Washington, March 20 : Scientists have reconstructed the fossil of a crustacean-like creature, to reveal that it is just one part of a complex and remarkable new animal dating back to 500 million years, that sheds light on the origin of the largest group of living animals, the arthropods.

Hurdia Victoria, the creature in question, was originally described in 1912 as a crustacean-like animal.

The fossil fragments puzzled together come from the famous 505 million year old Burgess Shale, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in British Columbia, Canada.

Washington, Mar 20 : A novel device implanted inside the spinal cord might offer an effective treatment against Parkinson’s disease, according to a study.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Centre have developed a prosthetic device, which applies electrical stimulation to the dorsal column in the spinal cord, the main sensory pathway carrying tactile information from the body to the brain.

Washington, Mar 20 : A team of American researchers has identified a gene that plays a critical regulatory role in the process of converting dietary carbohydrates to fat.

In a new study, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, disabled this gene in mice, which consequently had lower levels of body fat than their normal counterparts, despite being fed the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat pasta buffet.

Washington, Mar 20 : A new study from University of Cambridge has provided new evidence that the human brain lives "on the edge of chaos", at a critical transition point between randomness and order.

The researchers claim to have identified a mechanism called self-organized criticality, where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness.

This phenomenon might occur from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.