News briefs from 2011 AAAS meeting

Collected shorts from the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held February 17-21 in Washington, D.C.

You spin me right round
WASHINGTON —For the first time in a laboratory setting, physicists have linked the motion of an atom in a gas with its spin. Such “spin-orbit coupling” could help researchers build futuristic versions of devices such as transistors.