Global coral bleaching caused by climate change demands a global response
The fourth global coral bleaching event, announced this week, is an urgent wake-up call to the world.
The fourth global coral bleaching event, announced this week, is an urgent wake-up call to the world.
Plants & Animals
Apr 17, 2024
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Ceres, the largest asteroid in our solar system, harbors a dark secret: extremely young ice deposits in permanently shadowed craters near its poles. If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's because our moon and planet Mercury ...
Planetary Sciences
Apr 16, 2024
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109
US space scientists on Thursday unveiled the interplanetary probe NASA plans to send to one of Jupiter's icy moons as part of humanity's hunt for extra-terrestrial life.
Space Exploration
Apr 12, 2024
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481
Researchers using Murriyang, CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope, have detected unusual radio pulses from a previously dormant star with a powerful magnetic field.
Astronomy
Apr 8, 2024
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79
Scientists have used electrical pulses to manipulate magnetic information into a polarized light signal, a discovery that could revolutionize long-distance optical telecommunications, including between Earth and Mars.
Condensed Matter
Mar 28, 2024
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138
When darkness falls on central Ohio during the total solar eclipse on April 8, will animals think it's time to go to bed? Will they be anxious? Will they care?
Plants & Animals
Mar 22, 2024
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2
Quantum imaging is a growing field that takes advantage of the counterintuitive and "spooky" ability of light particles, or photons, to become linked, or entangled, under specialized circumstances. If the state of one photon ...
Optics & Photonics
Mar 20, 2024
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54
Frank Herbert's Dune is epic sci-fi storytelling with an environmental message at its heart. The novels and movies are set on the desert planet of Arrakis, which various characters dream of transforming into a greener world—much ...
Space Exploration
Mar 16, 2024
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64
Events in the stratosphere are making long-range weather in Northern Europe easier to forecast, researchers at LMU have discovered.
Earth Sciences
Mar 15, 2024
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503
Altermagnets represent a newly recognized class of materials in magnetism that could enable novel applications in spin-based electronics. Their magnetically ordered state consists of an antiparallel arrangement of microscopic ...
Condensed Matter
Mar 13, 2024
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19
Polarization (also polarisation) is a property of waves that describes the orientation of their oscillations. This article primarily covers the polarization of electromagnetic waves such as light, although other types of wave also exhibit polarization.
By convention, the polarization of light is described by specifying the direction of the wave's electric field. When light travels in free space, in most cases it propagates as a transverse wave—the polarization is perpendicular to the wave's direction of travel. In this case, the electric field may be oriented in a single direction (linear polarization), or it may rotate as the wave travels (circular or elliptical polarization). In the latter cases, the oscillations can rotate rightward or leftward in the direction of travel, and which of those two rotations is present in a wave is called the wave's chirality or handedness. In general the polarization of an electromagnetic (EM) wave is a complex issue. For instance in a waveguide such as an optical fiber, or for radially polarized beams in free space, the description of the wave's polarization is more complicated, as the fields can have longitudinal as well as transverse components. Such EM waves are either TM or hybrid modes.
For longitudinal waves such as sound waves in fluids, the direction of oscillation is by definition along the direction of travel, so there is no polarization. In a solid medium, however, sound waves can be transverse. In this case, the polarization is associated with the direction of the shear stress in the plane perpendicular to the propagation direction. This is important in seismology.
Polarization is significant in areas of science and technology dealing with wave propagation, such as optics, seismology, telecommunications and radar science. The polarization of light can be measured with a polarimeter.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA