Science Daily February 24, 2023 The historical epidemiology of plague is controversial due to the scarcity and ambiguity of available data. By phylogenetic analysis an international team of researchers (Canada, Denmark, USA – Indiana University, Rutgers, University of South Carolina, Australia) has revealed that the Danish Y. pestis sequences were interspersed with those from other European countries, rather than forming a single cluster, indicative of the generation, spread, and replacement of bacterial variants through communities rather than their long-term local persistence. These results provide an epidemiological link between Y. pestis and the unknown pestilence that afflicted medieval and early modern […]
A dozen exotic bacteria are found to passively collect rare earth elements from wastewater
Phys.org February 28, 2023 Biosorption of metal ions by phototrophic microorganisms is regarded as a sustainable and alternative method for bioremediation and metal recovery. Researchers in Germany optimized the conditions of rare earth elements (REE) uptake by the cyanobacterial biomass and characterized the most important chemical mechanisms for binding them. They found the highest absorption capacity of lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and terbium by 12 strains of cyanobacteria in laboratory culture. Biosorption depended strongly on acidity: it was highest at a pH of between five and six and decreased steadily in more acid solutions. They could adsorb amounts of REEs corresponding […]
Fickle winters in East Asia caused by major shift in regional atmospheric circulation, suggests study
Phys.org February 27, 2023 Researchers in Japan investigated the structure and dynamics of two distinct patterns. They showed that the winter climate over East Asia is influenced by two teleconnection patterns, the western Pacific pattern, and the Southeast Asia-Japan pattern. Using meteorological data for winters from 1974 to 2021 they established the baseline climate and analyzed anomalous departures from that baseline. In the first half of the 2020/2021 winter season, an anticyclonic circulation anomaly appeared over the southeastern Tibetan Plateau, and a corresponding cyclonic anomaly occurred over northern Japan. This pattern was associated with enhanced convection over the South China […]
‘Ghostly’ Glow of Entangled Light Now Reveals Hidden Objects Better Than Ever
Science Alert February 24, 2023 Ghost imaging involves the exploitation of non-local photon spatial correlations to image objects with light that has not interacted with them and, using intelligent spatial scanning with projective masks, reduces detection to a single pixel. Despite many applications, extension to complex amplitude objects remains challenging. Researchers in South Africa revealed that the necessary interference for phase retrieval was naturally embedded in the correlation measurements formed from traditional projective masks in bi-photon quantum ghost imaging. Using this, they developed a simple approach to obtain the full phase and amplitude information of complex objects. They demonstrated straightforward […]
New design for lithium-air battery could offer much longer driving range compared with the lithium-ion battery
Science Daily February 22, 2023 Lithium-air batteries have scope to compete with gasoline in terms of energy density. However, in most systems, the reaction pathways either involve one- or two-electron transfer, leading to lithium peroxide (Li2O2) or lithium superoxide (LiO2), respectively. A team of researchers in the US (Illinois Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois University) used a composite polymer electrolyte based on Li10GeP2S12 nanoparticles embedded in a modified polyethylene oxide polymer matrix. They found that Li2O is the main product in a room temperature solid-state lithium-air battery. The battery was rechargeable for 1000 cycles with a low polarization […]
New method creates material that could create the next generation of solar cells
Science Daily February 24, 2023 Halide perovskites show ubiquitous presences in growing fields at both fundamental and applied levels. Discovery, investigation, and application of innovative perovskites are heavily dependent on the synthetic methodology in terms of time-/yield-/effort-/energy- efficiency. Conventional wet chemistry method provides the easiness for growing thin film samples but represents as an inefficient way for bulk crystal synthesis. A team of researchers in the US (Pennsylvania State University, U.S. Army CCDCAMC) has developed a universal solid state-based route for synthesizing high-quality perovskites by means of simultaneously applying both electric and mechanical stress fields during the synthesis, i.e., the […]
Producing extreme ultraviolet laser pulses efficiently through wakesurfing behind electron beams
Nanowerk February 27, 2023 A team of researchers in the US (University of Michigan, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) has shown, through simulations, that laser pulse surfing in the wake of an electron beam pulse could get upshifted from visible to extreme ultraviolet light. They found phase-matching conditions for the pulse using a tailored density profile. An analytic solution for a 1D nonlinear plasma wake with an electron beam driver indicated that, even though the plasma density decreases, the frequency shift reaches no asymptotic limit, provided the wake can be sustained. In fully self-consistent 1D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations, more than 40 […]
The quantum twisting microscope: A new lens on quantum materials
Science Daily February 23, 2023 An international team of researchers (Israel, Japan) developed and demonstrated conceptually, a new type of tool — the quantum twisting microscope (QTM) — that could create novel quantum materials while simultaneously gazing into the most fundamental quantum nature of their electrons. It is capable of performing local interference experiments at its tip. The QTM is based on a unique van der Waals tip, allowing the creation of pristine two-dimensional junctions, which provide a multitude of coherently interfering paths for an electron to tunnel into a sample. With the addition of a continuously scanned twist angle […]
Scientists identify new mechanism of corrosion
Science Daily February 23, 2023 Often, the progression of localized corrosion is accompanied by the evolution of porosity in materials previously reported to be either three-dimensional or two-dimensional. Using new tools and analysis techniques, a team of researchers in the US (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University, MIT, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Virginia) realized that a more localized form of corrosion, which they call 1D wormhole corrosion, has previously been miscategorized in some situations. Using electron tomography, they showed multiple examples of 1D and percolating morphology. To understand the origin of this mechanism in a Ni-Cr alloy […]
Scientists improve the accuracy of weather and climate models
Phys.org March 1, 2023 Researchers in Switzerland have developed a new modelling framework for atmospheric flow simulations for cryospheric regions called CRYOWRF. CRYOWRF couples the state-of-the-art and used atmospheric model WRF (the Weather Research and Forecasting model) with the detailed snow cover model SNOWPACK. CRYOWRF makes it feasible to simulate the dynamics of a large number of snow layers governed by grain-scale prognostic variables with online coupling to the atmosphere for multiscale simulations from the synoptic to the turbulent scales. They also introduced a scheme for blowing snow in CRYOWRF. They described the technical design goals, model capabilities and the […]