MIT News December 22, 2020 The year’s popular research stories include astronomical firsts, scientific breakthroughs, and engineering milestones addressing Covid-19 and other global problems. Despite the new challenges brought on by Covid-19 — and sometimes because of them — MIT’s community achieved important milestones on the frontiers of science and engineering. 10 research-related stories published in the previous 12 months received top views on MIT News…read more.
Author Archives: Hema Viswanath
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of December 25, 2020
01. Developing smarter, faster machine intelligence with light 02. Experiment takes ‘snapshots’ of light, stops light, uses light to change properties of matter 03. Perfect transmission through barrier using sound 04. Skyrmions proposed as the basis for a completely new computer architecture 05. When light and atoms share a common vibe 06. New energy conversion layer for biosolar cells 07. Researchers propose process to detect and contain emerging diseases 08. Chemists convert plastic bottle waste into insecticide sorbent 09. Artificial intelligence solves Schrödinger’s equation 10. Nature Podcast highlights of 2020 (47 min)
Artificial intelligence solves Schrödinger’s equation
Phys.org December 21, 2020 The goal of quantum chemistry is to predict chemical and physical properties of molecules based solely on the arrangement of their atoms in space, avoiding the need for resource-intensive and time-consuming laboratory experiments. In principle, this can be achieved by solving the Schrödinger equation. Up to now, it has been impossible to find an exact solution for arbitrary molecules that can be efficiently computed. To solve this problem researchers in Germany have proposed PauliNet, a deep-learning wavefunction ansatz that achieves nearly exact solutions of the electronic Schrödinger equation for molecules with up to 30 electrons. PauliNet […]
Chemists convert plastic bottle waste into insecticide sorbent
Phys.org December 23, 2020 An international team of researchers (Russia, China, Czech Republic, South Korea) created a sorbent that belongs to metal-organic frameworks, for imidacloprid insecticide removal from water. They developed a method to synthesize a metal-organic framework named UiO-66 with zirconium ions. The framework is sensitive to imidacloprid and due to its porosity and physicochemical properties, it attracts insecticide molecules removing them from water. In tests effective water purification took 15 grams of sorbent per liter. The sorbent may be reused several times. They reached up to five cycles during experiments. In the future the sorbent can be used […]
Developing smarter, faster machine intelligence with light
Phys.org December 18, 2020 Optical alternatives to electronic hardware could help speed up machine learning processes by simplifying the way information is processed in a non-iterative way. However, photonic-based machine learning is typically limited by the number of components that can be placed on photonic integrated circuits, limiting the interconnectivity, while free-space spatial-light-modulators are restricted to slow programming speeds. A team of researchers in the US (George Washington University, UCLA, industry) replaced spatial light modulators with digital mirror-based technology, thus developing a system over 100 times faster. The non-iterative timing of this processor, in combination with rapid programmability and massive […]
Experiment takes ‘snapshots’ of light, stops light, uses light to change properties of matter
Phys.org December 23, 2020 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Japan, Taiwan) trapped surface plasmon polaritons of green light and imaged their propagation on a silver surface at the speed of light so that the light waves came together from two sides to form a light vortex. They took electron microscope images of the emitted electrons to make a snapshot. The light vortex fields can potentially cause transitions in the quantum mechanical phase order in solid state materials, such that the transformed material structure and its mirror image cannot be superimposed. In other words, the […]
Nature Podcast highlights of 2020 (47 min)
Nature December 23, 2020 The Nature Podcast team select some of their favourite stories from the past 12 months. The following are covered in this this episode: Following the Viking footprint across Europe, Mars hopes, Disaster in San Quentin, Communicating complex data, ‘Stick to the science’: when science gets political…read more.
New energy conversion layer for biosolar cells
Phys.org December 21, 2020 Well‐defined assemblies of photosynthetic protein complexes are required for an optimal performance of semi‐artificial energy conversion devices, capable of providing unidirectional electron flow when light‐harvesting proteins are interfaced with electrode surfaces. An international team of researchers (Germany, Portugal) has developed a mixed photosystem I (PSI) monolayers constituted of native cyanobacterial PSI trimers in combination with isolated PSI monomers from the same organism. The resulting compact arrangement ensures a high density of photoactive protein complexes per unit area, providing the basis to effectively minimize short‐circuiting processes that typically limit the performance of PSI‐based bioelectrodes. The PSI film […]
Perfect transmission through barrier using sound
Science Daily December 23, 2020 Tunneling plays an essential role in many branches of physics and has found important applications. It is theoretically proposed that Klein tunneling occurs when, under normal incidence, quasiparticles exhibit unimpeded penetration through potential barriers independent of their height and width. A team of researchers in the US (UC Berkeley, Georgia Institute of Technology, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) created a phononic heterojunction by sandwiching two types of artificial phononic crystals with different Dirac point energies. They demonstrated direct observation of Klein tunneling as shown by the key feature of unity transmission. Their experiment reveals that Klein […]
Researchers propose process to detect and contain emerging diseases
Science Daily December 18, 2020 To date, the main pre-emptive response to zoonotic diseases outbreaks has been extensive, cost-heavy efforts to document virus diversity in wildlife. To enable fast detection of new zoonotic disease outbreaks, an international team of researchers (USA – University of Arkansas, George Washington University, University of South Carolina, Kenya, Canada, France Gabon, Republic of Congo, Rwanda) proposes a system of procuring and screening samples from hospital patients with fevers of unknown origin, analyzing samples from suspicious fatalities of unknown cause, testing blood serum in high-risk or sentinel groups and analyzing samples that have already been collected […]