LSI Industries Announces Consolidation of Its Dallas, Texas Manufacturing Facility

June 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment

CINCINNATI, June 1, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — LSI Industries Inc. (Nasdaq:LYTS)
today announced that it will consolidate the Dallas-based landscape and
architectural outdoor lighting operations of LSI Greenlee Lighting into its
Cincinnati manufacturing facility. This consolidation action, which is expected
to be completed in phases over the next six months, is being taken to centralize
manufacturing operations, lower costs, and improve capacity utilization in the
Company’s main lighting facility. The award winning product lines of Greenlee
will continue to be promoted and supported in the Company’s markets. Certain
engineering and sales personnel will remain in Dallas. The Company believes this
consolidation will accelerate its initiative of introducing LED light sources
into its landscape and architectural outdoor lighting products. Efforts will be
made to sub-lease the 40,000 square foot facility in Dallas which is leased by
LSI Industries through February 2012. All expenses incurred in connection with
this facility consolidation will be recorded as period expenses, and
discontinued operations accounting treatment will not apply.

“Safe Harbor” Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of
1995

This document contains certain forward-looking statements that are subject to
numerous assumptions, risks or uncertainties. The Private Securities Litigation
Reform Act of 1995 provides a safe harbor for forward-looking statements.
Forward-looking statements may be identified by words such as “guidance,”
“forecasts,” “estimates,” “anticipates,” “projects,” “plans,” “expects,”
“intends,” “believes,” “seeks,” “may,” “will,” “should” or the negative versions
of those words and similar expressions, and by the context in which they are
used. Such statements, including statements contained herein regarding
anticipated trends in the Company’s business, are based upon current
expectations of the Company and speak only as of the date made. Actual results
could differ materially from those contained in or implied by such
forward-looking statements as a result of a variety of risks and uncertainties.
These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the impact of
competitive products and services, product demand and market acceptance risks,
reliance on key customers, financial difficulties experienced by customers,
potential costs associated with litigation and regulatory compliance, the
adequacy of reserves and allowances for doubtful accounts, fluctuations in
operating results or costs, unexpected difficulties in integrating acquired
businesses, the cyclical and seasonal nature of our business, the ability to
retain key employees of acquired businesses and any other factors that may be
identified in our reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission,
including our Annual Report on Form 10-K. The Company has no obligation to
update any forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or
circumstances.

About the Company

LSI Industries is an Image Solutions company, dedicated to advancing solid-state
LED technology in lighting and graphics applications. We combine integrated
technology, design, and manufacturing to supply high quality, environmentally
friendly lighting fixtures and graphics elements for commercial, retail and
specialty niche market applications. LSI is a U.S. manufacturer with marketing /
sales efforts throughout the world with concentration currently on North
American, South American, Asian, Australian, New Zealand and European markets.

Building upon its success with the Crossover(R) LED canopy fixture, LSI is
committed to producing affordable, high performance, energy efficient lighting
products, including solid-state LED light fixtures, for indoor and outdoor use.
The Company also designs, produces, markets and manages a wide array of custom
indoor and outdoor graphics programs including signage, menu board systems,
decorative fixturing, LED displays and digital signage, and large format
billboard and sports screens using solid-state LED technology. In addition, we
provide design support, engineering, installation and project management for
custom rollout programs for today’s retail environment. The Company’s technology
R&D operation located in Montreal, Canada designs, produces and supports high
performance light engines and large format billboard, sports and entertainment
video screens using solid-state LED technology.

LSI’s major markets are the commercial / industrial lighting, petroleum /
convenience store, multi-site retail (including automobile dealerships,
restaurants and national retail accounts), sports and entertainment markets. LSI
employs approximately 1,300 people in facilities located in Ohio, New York,
North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Texas and Montreal, Canada. The
Company’s common shares are traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the
symbol LYTS.

The LSI Industries Inc. logo is available at

http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=3646.

For further information, contact either Bob Ready, Chief Executive Officer and
President, or Ron Stowell, Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and
Treasurer at (513) 793-3200.

CONTACT: LSI Industries
Bob Ready
Ron Stowell
(513) 793-3200

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Beetles use ”Avatar” technology to locate each other

April 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 20 (ANI): Jewel scarab beetles use the same technology that created the 3D effects for the blockbuster movie Avatar to find each other—and hide from their enemies, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Texas, the jewel scarab species Chrysina gloriosa can distinguish between circularly polarized and unpolarized light.

The ability could provide the beetles with a tremendous advantage because most of the light reflected off these beetles” colourful bodies happens to be circularly polarized, said the researchers.

“The trait would allow the beetles to easily see each other while simultaneously hiding from predators that cannot see circular polarized light,” said physicist Parrish Brady, who conducted the research with Molly Cummings.

Circular polarization (CP) is a way of filtering light that causes the light”s electric field to travel in a circular pattern, as opposed to oscillating in all directions as is does in unpolarized light.

CP filters are now used to create 3D effects in movies, such as James Cameron”s Avatar.

Human eyes don”t have the ability to perceive CP light, which is why we need special glasses to view films that use CP.

Scientists have known that jewel scarabs reflect CP light since the renowned physicist Albert Michelson discovered it in 1911.

However, to find out if they can also detect CP light (without the snazzy glasses), the researchers took advantage of beetles” propensity to fly toward light.

They conducted a series of experiments, to see if jewel scarabs alter their flight patterns in the presence of CP light.

“We found significant differences in the beetles” flights toward circularly polarized and unpolarized light sources, suggesting that their eyes are outfitted to be sensitive to circularly polarized light,” said Brady.

The finding makes Chrysina gloriosa only the second species on Earth known to be sensitive to CP light—the other being a species of shrimp.

It is believed that the ability to both see and reflect CP light probably evolved to allow jewel scarabs to communicate with each other while staying hidden from predators, but Brady and Cummings are planning more research to see exactly how these beetles use this very rare way of seeing and being seen.

Their research is published in the May issue of the American Naturalist. (ANI)

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Scientists come a step closer in controlling how matter behaves

March 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, March 25 (ANI): A team of scientists has used laser light to control x-ray beams, which is a step toward controlling how matter behaves, shaping x-rays with other x-rays, and eventually directing the paths chemical reactions can take.

Working at the Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source’s femtosecond beamline 6.0.2, the team of scientists shows how it can be done.

As a new generation of powerful light sources comes online, intense x-ray beams may be able to control matter directly and allow one beam of x-rays to control another.

Using the ALS’s femtosecond (quadrillionth of a second) spectroscopy beamline 6.0.2, Thornton E. Glover and his colleagues sent ultrashort pulses of laser light and higher-frequency x-rays together through a gas cell filled with pressurized neon.

Excited by the laser pulses, the gas, which normally absorbs x-rays, became transparent to the x-ray pulses during their quick passage.

“We were inspired by the interesting new science demonstrated in quantum optics experiments that use visible light to control visible light,” said Glover.

“One spectacular example is slowing light to a near standstill in some media. The ability to, in effect, stop light in a medium has potential applications for quantum information storage and processing,” he added.

Glover said that another example of optical control is using visible light to induce transparency in a medium.

“We embarked on our own research in the hope that it would lead to new and interesting ways to use x-rays as well as visible light,” he said.

The experiment’s intense laser pulses created brief coherent superposition states in the dense neon gas inside the cell, which rendered the pressurized neon in the gas cell transparent to the x-rays.

“Quantum mechanicaly speaking, there is destructive interference between two absorption pathways and this reduces the absorption,” said Glover. “That is, it makes the medium transparent,” he added.

For the first time, optical pulses had been used to control how x-rays interact with matter.

The experimenters quickly put this ephemeral neon window to practical service, using it to measure the duration of the femtosecond-scale x-ray pulse to high accuracy more simply than has been possible before, with the added ability of shaping x-ray pulses on a femtosecond time scale.

“By demonstrating a way to shape x-rays on the femtosecond time scale, we’ve opened the door to ‘quantum control’ experiments – now possible only with long-wavelength light – in the x-ray regime,” said Glover. (ANI)

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Tailor-made nanoparticles may be used as light sources for display screens

June 27, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, June 27 (ANI): Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces have tailor-made nanoparticles that can be used as position lights on cell proteins and as light sources for display screens or for optical information technology in the future.

The researchers produced cadmium sulphide particles in microscopically small membrane bubbles.

Depending on which of the construction manuals they follow, the particles can be 4 or 50 nanometres in size.

Because the membrane bubbles have the same size as living cells, the scientists’ work also provides an indication as to how nanostructures could arise in nature.

The scientists form bubbles that are around 50 micrometres in size from lecithin membranes, which are similar to biological membranes.

Like cells, membrane bubbles, or vesicles as scientists refer to them, also provide a closed reaction container.

The scientists load the membrane bubbles with one of two reactants for the nanoparticles. From this point, the researchers have developed two different sets of protocols.

In one case, they produce bubbles loaded with one of the two reactants, sodium sulphide or cadmium chloride.

The scientists then bring the bubbles with the different loads together and fuse two vesicles to form a bigger vesicle. This is done by subjecting the bubble cocktail to a short but very strong electrical pulse.

The electric shock fuses the membranes of two adjacent bubbles.

“Because the reactants are only present to a limited extent in the fused bubbles, the particles only grow to a size of four nanometers,” explained Rumiana Dimova from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces.

The scientists were able to track the entire process directly under the microscope because they had added different fluorescent molecules to the membranes of the differently loaded vesicles.

The researchers were also able to see the nanoparticles forming as the particles shone like tiny lamps.

“With our method, we succeeded for the first time in producing particles with a certain diameter in vesicles whose size corresponds to that of cells,” said Dimova. (ANI)

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Scientists demonstrate laser with controlled polarization

April 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, April 13 (ANI): A team of scientists has demonstrated, for the first time, lasers in which the direction of oscillation of the emitted radiation, known as polarization, can be designed and controlled at will.

The demonstration was made by applied scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with researchers from Hamamatsu Photonics in Hamamatsu City, Japan.

The innovation opens the door to a wide range of applications in photonics and communications.

“Polarization is one of the key features defining a laser beam. Controlling it represents an important new step towards beam engineering of lasers with unprecedented flexibility, tailored for specific applications,” explained graduate student Federico Capasso.

“The novelty of our approach is that instead of being conducted externally, which requires bulky and expensive optical components, manipulation of the beam polarization is achieved by directly integrating the polarizer on the laser facet,” he added.

“This compact solution is applicable to semiconductor lasers and other solid-state lasers, all the way from communication wavelengths to the mid-infrared and Terahertz spectrum,” he further added.

Light sources with a desirable polarization state are useful for a wide variety of applications.

For example, satellite communications use two orthogonal polarizations to double the capacity of the channel; circularly-polarized light sources are necessary to detect certain biomolecules; and laser sources with a variety of polarization states have relevance for quantum cryptography.

To achieve the results, the researchers sculpted a metallic structure, dubbed a plasmonic polarizer directly on the facet of a quantum cascade (QC) laser.

The QC laser emitted at a wavelength of ten microns (in the invisible part of the spectrum known as the mid-infrared where the atmosphere is transparent).

The team was able to control the state of polarization by generating both linearly polarized light along an arbitrary direction and circularly polarized light. (ANI)

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Scientists use ‘rogue’ laser waves to build better light sources

March 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, March 6 (ANI): Scientists are putting rogue laser waves to work in order to produce brighter, more stable white light sources, a breakthrough in optics that may pave the way for better clocks, faster cameras, and more powerful radar and communications technologies.

The rogue waves of light, rare and explosive flare-ups that are mathematically similar to their oceanic counterparts, have been developed by a group of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Rogue bursts of light were first spotted a year ago during the generation of a special kind of radiation called supercontinuum (SC).

SC light is created by shooting laser pulses into crystals and optical fibers.

Like the incandescent bulb in a lamp, it shines with a white light that spans an extremely broad spectrum. But unlike a bulb’s soft diffuse glow, SC light maintains the brightness and directionality of a laser beam.

This makes it suitable for a wide variety of applications – a fact recognized by the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded in part to scientists who used SC light to measure atomic transitions with extraordinary accuracy.

Despite more than 40 years of research, SC light has proven to be difficult to control and prone to instability.

Though rogue waves are not the cause of this instability, the UCLA researchers suspected that a better understanding of how noise in SC light triggers rogue waves could improve their control of this bright white light.

Rogue waves occur randomly in SC light and are so short-lived that the team had to employ a new technique just to spot them.

By tinkering with the initial laser pulses used to create SC light, Solli and his team discovered how to reproduce the rogue waves, harness them, and put them to work.

His results demonstrate that a weak burst of light, broadcast at the perfect “tickle spot,” produces a rogue wave on demand.

Instead of disrupting things, it stabilizes SC light, reducing fluctuations by at least 90 percent. The seed wave also decreases the amount of energy needed to produce a supercontinuum by 25 percent.

This new-and-improved white light could help to push forward a range of technologies.

Solli and Bahram Jalali are developing time-stretching devices that slow down electrical signals; such devices could be used in new optical analog-to-digital converters 1,000 times faster than current electronic versions.

These converters could help to overcome the current conversion-rate bottleneck that holds back advanced radar and communication technologies.

Stabilized SC light could also be used to create super-fast cameras for laboratory use or incorporated into optical clockworks. (ANI)

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