Trapping the light fantastic

Light fantastic

postdoctoral experience. It is important to stay close enough to your background to facilitate continuity and, at the same time, to take a different path that demonstrates originality and growth. The choice of research problems to address is obviously crucial. There will be many distractions and it is necessary to be a good citizen and accept responsibilities but also to stay focused and produc...

Fly Courtship Song: Triggering the Light Fantastic

In a study in this issue, Clyne and Miesenböck (2008) apply an ingenious optogenetic technology to activate neurons that generate male-specific courtship song in flies. This work sheds new light on the neural circuitry underlying sexually dimorphic behaviors in Drosophila.

The Light Fantastic: Using airborne lidar in archaeological survey

The light fantastic: PHOTON materials for technician education

Project PHOTON has developed a set of instructional materials suitable for a onesemester laboratory based introduction to photonics course. The textbook, laboratory experiment kit and laboratory manual have been thoroughly field tested by participating high schools and two year colleges. All materials have been aligned to national Math, Science, Technology and Language Arts standards. OCIS code...

Trapping Light With Mirrors

We show that, given finitely many line-segment mirrors in the plane, that do not touch, and an arbitrary point source of light, if all angles made by lines parallel to mirrors are rational multiples of π, then all but countably many emitted light beams escape. This result is shown to imply that, for a given point source of light, a randomly chosen configuration of finitely many nontouching line...