* Astronomy

A new way of bending X-ray beams developed by MIT researchers could lead to greatly improved space telescopes, as well new tools for biology and for the manufacture of semiconductor chips.
X-rays from space provide astronomers with important information about the most exotic events and objects in our universe, such as dark energy, black holes and neutron stars. But X-rays are notoriously difficult to collect and many interesting cosmic sources are faint, which makes collecting these high-energy rays difficult and time-consuming, even with telescopes on satellites far above our X-ray-absorbing atmosphere.
Now a group of researchers from MIT has fabricated a new, highly efficient nanoscale Venetian-blind-like device that contains thousands of ultrasmooth mirror slats per millimetre for use in future improved space-based X-ray telescopes.

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