Phys.com April 27, 2023 The continuing decline in the diversity and biomass of insects and other arthropods has caused great concern not only among scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders. A major reason for this is that many ecosystem services depend on diverse insect communities. Despite numerous studies on the dynamics of insect communities their causes are still not fully understood. An international team of researchers (Switzerland, Germany) addressed the causes and consequences of population and diversity trends spanning 10 to 120 years aiming at a better mechanistic understanding of the observed dynamics. covering freshwater and terrestrial insect taxa across five biomes. […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of April 28, 2023
01. Developing Agile, Reliable Sensing Systems with Microbes 02. Drones navigate unseen environments with liquid neural networks 03. Generation of color-tunable high-performance LG laser beams via Janus OPO 04. Intelligent membranes with memories for next-generation smart filters 05. Metamaterials: Time crystal gives light a boost 06. Nanowire networks learn and remember like a human brain 07. New approach to developing efficient, high-precision 3D light shapers 08. Two qudits fully entangled 09. Valley-transistor in two-dimensional materials – an ingredient for all-optical quantum technologies 10. Researchers discover new radiation effects in photonic time crystals And others Can We Make a System That […]
Can We Make a System That Will Anticipate Violent Crises? These Researchers Think So
Science Alert April 23, 2023 Researchers from around the world have embarked on an effort to try to build a system allowing humanity to anticipate violent conflicts before they erupt – and thus potentially prevent them. Looking decades ahead project is backed by the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator Foundation (GESDA), the Geneva Center for Security Policy (GCSP), and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). The initial workshop was focused essentially on identifying ways that this kind of anticipation could happen. Future workshops to be held in New York and Geneva later this year could zero in […]
Developing Agile, Reliable Sensing Systems with Microbes
DARPA April 21, 2023 DARPA’s new Tellus program will explore the development of an interactive, platform methodology for the rapid design of microbe-based sense-and-respond devices for monitoring DOD-relevant environments. Specifically, DARPA seeks to establish the range of chemical and physical signals that microbial devices can detect, environmental conditions they can tolerate, and types of output signals that can be generated. They envision a dashboard or interface where a user would dial in features of their environment, the inputs they want to detect, and the output signals that are useful to them, and the system would design a safe, effective microbial […]
Drones navigate unseen environments with liquid neural networks
MIT News April 19, 2023 Autonomous robots can learn to perform visual navigation tasks from offline human demonstrations and generalize online and unseen scenarios within the same environment they have been trained on. It is challenging for these agents to take a step further and robustly generalize to new environments with drastic scenery changes that they have never encountered. Researchers at MIT have developed a method to create robust flight navigation agents that successfully perform vision-based fly-to-target tasks beyond their training environment under drastic distribution shifts. They designed an imitation learning framework using liquid neural networks, a brain-inspired class of […]
Generation of color-tunable high-performance LG laser beams via Janus OPO
Phys.org April 24, 2023 Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes of light wave can carry the external torque of photons as they move through space. However, LG mode laser sources do not yet exist. An international team of researchers (China, USA – University of Arkansas) has experimentally demonstrated highly efficient, highly pure, broadly tunable, and topological-charge-controllable LG modes from a Janus optical parametric oscillator (OPO). They designed the Janus OPO featuring a two-faced cavity mode to guarantee an efficient evolution from a Gaussian-shaped fundamental pump mode to a desired LG parametric mode. The output LG mode had a tunable wavelength between 1.5 and […]
Intelligent membranes with memories for next-generation smart filters
Phys.org April 19, 2023 Two essential features of intelligent transport are the ability to adapt to different external and internal conditions and memorize the previous state. In biological systems, the most common form of such intelligence is expressed as hysteresis. Despite numerous advances made over previous decades on smart membranes, it remains a challenge to create a synthetic membrane with stable hysteretic behaviour for molecular transport. Researchers in the UK demonstrated the memory effects and stimuli-regulated transport of molecules through an intelligent, phase-changing MoS2 membrane in response to external pH. They showed that water and ion permeation through 1T′ MoS2 […]
Metamaterials: Time crystal gives light a boost
Nanowerk April 25, 2023 Photonic time crystals are artificial materials whose electromagnetic properties are uniform in space but periodically vary in time. The synthesis of these materials and experimental observation of their physics remains very challenging because of the stringent requirement for uniform modulation of material properties in volumetric samples. An international team of researchers (Finland, Germany, USA – Stanford University) has extended the concept of photonic time crystals to metasurfaces. They demonstrated that time-varying metasurfaces not only preserve key physical properties of volumetric photonic time crystals despite their simpler topology but also host common momentum bandgaps shared by both […]
Nanowire networks learn and remember like a human brain
Phys.org April 21, 2023 In their previous work an international team of researchers (Australia, Japan, USA – NIST) showed how nanotechnology could be used to build a brain-inspired electrical device with neural network-like circuitry and synapse-like signaling. Their current work paves the way towards replicating brain-like learning and memory in non-biological hardware systems and suggests that the underlying nature of brain-like intelligence may be physical. They implemented task variations inspired by the n-back task (a common memory task used in human psychology experiments) in a nanowire network (NWN) device and applied external feedback to emulate brain-like supervised and reinforcement learning. […]
New approach to developing efficient, high-precision 3D light shapers
Phys.org April 22, 2023 Specifically tailored refractive index of light modifications, directly manufactured inside glass using a short pulsed laser, enable an almost arbitrary control of the light flow. However, the stringent requirements for quantitative knowledge of these modifications, as well as for fabrication precision, have so far prevented the fabrication of light-efficient aperiodic photonic volume elements (APVEs). An international team of researchers (Austria, Germany, UK) has developed a powerful approach to the design and manufacturing of light-efficient APVEs. They optimized application-specific three-dimensional arrangements of hundreds of thousands of microscopic voxels and manufactured them using femtosecond direct laser writing inside […]