Global Biodefense April 8, 2022 Under a five-year grant from NIAID researchers at Albany Medical College are working to develop a vaccine that could protect against plague. Bubonic plague is the most common naturally occurring form of the three main types of plague, which also include pneumonic plague and septicemic plague. In the U.S., plague is most common in rural areas of the southwest, particularly New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. It is treated with antibiotics. There is no vaccine currently available that provides long-term defense against it. While plague in humans is relatively rare, there strains that are resistant to […]
Author Archives: Hema Viswanath
Optimizing silicon structure to reduce reflection
Nanowerk April 14, 2022 Researchers in China examined changes in the porous structure of silicon to make it less reflective and thus a better material for solar absorbing technology. Currently, the reflectivity of porous silicon prepared using electrochemical methods is around 5 to 10 per cent, with the lowest reflectivity being 4.7 per cent for light in the wavelength range of 300 to 1000 nanometres. They calculated and compared the surface reflectivity of porous silicon structures with different pore sizes. They discovered that the porous silicon structure when prepared under the optimal corrosion parameters can achieve an average reflectivity as […]
Quantum teleportation: The express lane for quantum data traffic
Phys.org April 11, 2022 Short-distance quantum encryption is already used commercially. However, to implement a global quantum network, photon loss becomes in issue. An international team of researchers (Australia, USA – NIST) demonstrated an error reduction method that improved the performance of a channel. They sent a photon which is not carrying any useful information, through the loss. Using a noiseless linear amplifier, they corrected for the effects of loss and recovered the lost quantum state to teleport the information they wanted to transmit into the now corrected carrier, avoiding all the loss on the channel. The arbitrary quantum information […]
Researchers create a magnet made of one molecule
Phys.org April 13, 2022 Single-molecule magnets (SMMs) are molecules that can retain magnetic polarization in the absence of an external magnetic field and embody the ultimate size limit for spin-based information storage and processing. An international team of researchers (USA – Michigan State University, UK) synthesized two bismuth-cluster-bridged lanthanide complexes via a solution organometallic approach. The neutral heterometallocubane core features lanthanide centers that are bridged by a rare Bi66− Zintl ion, which supports strong ferromagnetic interactions between lanthanides. This afforded the rare observation of magnetic blocking and open hysteresis loops for superexchange-coupled SMMs comprising solely lanthanide ions. The small scale […]
‘Robot scientist’ Eve finds that less than one third of scientific results are reproducible
Science Daily April 6, 2022 The reproducibility and robustness of only a small fraction of published biomedical results has been tested. An international team of researchers (UK, USA – University of Chicago) used a combination of automated text analysis and the ‘robot scientist’ Eve to semi-automate the process of finding papers reporting reproducible results. Out of the more than 12,000 research papers on breast cancer cell biology, after narrowing down to 74 papers of high scientific interest, only 22 papers were found to be reproducible. Two different human teams used Eve and two breast cancer cell lines and attempted to […]
Scientists find ‘knob’ to control magnetic behavior in quantum material
Science Daily April 12, 2022 A key to unlocking new functionalities in quantum materials is the discovery of tunable coupling between spins and other microscopic degrees of freedom. A team of researchers in the US (Pennsylvania State University, University, UC San Diego, Northwestern University SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Stanford University) has found evidence for interlayer magnetophononic coupling in the layered magnetic topological insulator MnBi2Te4. They observed anomalies in phonon scattering intensities across magnetic field-driven phase transitions, despite the absence of discernible static structural changes. This behavior is a consequence of a magnetophononic wave-mixing process that allows for […]
Send in the Blow Flies: Using Insects to Sample Areas for Chemical Warfare Agents
Global Biodefense April 11, 2022 Blow flies sample the environment as they search for water and food sources and can be trapped from kilometers away using baited traps. Under a program sponsored by DARPA a team of researchers at Indiana University-Purdue University investigated blow flies as environmental chemical sample collectors following a chemical warfare attack (CWA). They exposed three species of blow flies to CWA simulants dimethyl methylphosphonate and diethyl phosphoramidate as well as the pesticide dichlorvos, followed by treatment-dependent temperature and humidity conditions to determine the persistence and detectability of these compounds under varying environmental conditions. Flies were sacrificed […]
Tailored single photons: Optical control of photons as the key to new technologies
Nanowerk April 6, 2022 Several different approaches to realize solid-state quantum emitters with high performance have been pursued and different concepts for energy tuning have been established. However, the properties of the emitted photons are always defined by the individual quantum emitter and can therefore not be controlled with full flexibility. An international team of researchers (Germany, USA – University of Arizona) has developed an all-optical nonlinear method to tailor and control the single photon emission. They demonstrated a laser-controlled down-conversion process from an excited state of a semiconductor quantum three-level system. Based on this concept, they realized energy tuning […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of April 8, 2022
01. Converting body heat into electricity: A step closer towards high-performance organic thermoelectrics 02. ‘Freeze-thaw battery’ is adept at preserving its energy 03. Making a ‘sandwich’ out of magnets and topological insulators, potential for lossless electronics 04. Nanomaterials: Light dependent atom clusters for sensing applications 05. Nano particle trapped between mirrors works as a quantum sensor 06. NASA uses moonlight to improve satellite accuracy 07. New quantum dots for quantum networks 08. New study solves mystery of how soft liquid droplets erode hard surfaces 09. Pollen paper that you can print on and ‘unprint’ 10. Quantum ‘shock absorbers’ allow perovskite […]
Converting body heat into electricity: A step closer towards high-performance organic thermoelectrics
Science Daily April 4, 2022 Researchers in Germany investigated the charge and thermoelectric transport in modulation-doped large-area rubrene thin-film crystals with different crystal phases. They showed that modulation doping allows achieving superior doping efficiencies even for high doping densities when conventional bulk doping runs into the reserve regime. Modulation-doped orthorhombic rubrene achieved much improved thermoelectric power factors. Modulation doping technique avoid impurity scattering in the highly ordered undoped narrow bandgap semiconductor allowing both carrier concentration and mobility to be independently maximized. The work paves new ways to achieve flexible thermoelectric devices to directly generate electrical power from heat in an […]