Phys.org January 23, 2023 Researchers in China constructed two heterometallic clusters to improve the solar absorption and performance of titanium oxo clusters. Their studies indicated that these structures exhibited enhanced visible-light absorption and significantly reduced optical band gaps which could be mainly attributed to the introduction of electron-rich molybdenum (Mo) pairs as heterometals. They found that the electron-rich Mo–Mo pairs could be introduced to titanium oxo clusters to enhance visible-light absorption. They attributed the reduction in the band gaps to the introduction of electron-rich Mo-Mo pairs as heterometals. They also found that the bands shift effectively toward the visible-light region. […]
US skills gap rapidly widening, survey reveals
Phys.org January 24, 2023 According to Wiley’s latest annual Closing the Skills Gap https://universityservices.wiley.com/closing-the-skills-gap-2023/?utm_source=press_release&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=skills_gap_2023 report companies are having an increasingly difficult time attracting and retaining workers who have the skills needed to fill their open jobs. Among 600 U.S. human resources professionals surveyed by Wiley, 69% said their organization has a skills gap, up from 55% in a similar survey in 2021. While some organizations address their skills gap by hiring new employees or using contractors, the majority say they try to upskill or reskill current employees to fill the gap. Those that lack the development initiatives and in-house resources […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of January 20, 2023
01. Blocking radio waves and electromagnetic interference with the flip of a switch 02. Breathing supercapacitor 03. Deflecting lightning with a laser lightning rod 04. Lab develops new method for on-chip generation of single photon 05. Mathematics at the speed of light 06. Nanoparticles make it easier to turn light into solvated electrons 07. Now on the molecular scale: Electric motors 08. Organic semiconductors curl up in the dark 09. Researchers create an optical tractor beam that pulls macroscopic objects 10. Researchers develop fluidic memristor with diverse neuromorphic functions And others… ChatGPT writes convincing fake scientific abstracts that fool reviewers […]
Blocking radio waves and electromagnetic interference with the flip of a switch
Phys.org January 16, 2023 Foam materials can adjust the reflection and absorption of microwaves, enabling a tunable electromagnetic interference shielding capability. But their thickness of several millimetres hinders their application in integrated electronics. Researchers at Drexel University have developed a method for modulating the reflection and absorption of incident electromagnetic waves using various submicrometre-thick MXene thin films. The reversible tunability of electromagnetic interference shielding effectiveness was realized by electrochemically driven ion intercalation and de-intercalation; this resulted in charge transfer efficiency with different electrolytes, accompanied by expansion and shrinkage of the MXene layer spacing. They demonstrated an irreversible electromagnetic interference shielding […]
Breathing supercapacitor
Nanowerk January 13, 2023 Currently commercialized supercapacitors still suffer from limited energy densities. Taking inspiration from anolis lizard, an international team of researchers (UK, China) has developed a supercapacitor with a “breathing” electrode. To breathe underwater the lizard brings along an air bubble that is attached to a layer of scales on their head. Under water, it repeatedly breathes this bubble in and out. The researchers used chlorine gas which iteratively reinspires in porous carbon materials, that improves the energy density by orders of magnitude. They showed that porous carbon with pore size around 3 nm delivers the best chlorine […]
ChatGPT writes convincing fake scientific abstracts that fool reviewers in study
Nanowerk January 16, 2023 A team of researchers in the US (Northwestern University, University of Chicago) took titles from recent papers from high-impact journals and asked ChatGPT to generate abstracts. They ran these generated abstracts and the original abstracts through a plagiarism detector and AI output detector, and had blinded human reviewers try to differentiate between generated and original abstracts. Each reviewer was given 25 abstracts that were a mixture of the generated and original abstracts and asked them to give a binary score of what they thought the abstract was. They could only spot ChatGPT generated abstracts 68% of […]
Deflecting lightning with a laser lightning rod
Phys.org January 16, 2023 An international team of researchers (France, Switzerland, Germany, USA – New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Sweden) conducted the first field-result that experimentally demonstrated lightning guided by lasers. They conducted an experimental campaign on the Säntis mountain in north-eastern Switzerland during the summer of 2021 with a high-repetition-rate terawatt laser. The guiding of an upward negative lightning leader over a distance of 50 m was recorded by two separate high-speed cameras. It was corroborated in three other instances by very-high-frequency interferometric measurements, and the number of X-ray bursts detected during guided lightning events greatly increased. According […]
Lab develops new method for on-chip generation of single photon
Phys.org January 17, 2023 Optically active defects in 2D materials, such as hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), are an attractive class of single-photon emitters. An international team of researchers (USA – UC Santa Barbara, Japan) has demonstrated a novel approach to precisely align and embed hBN and TMDs within background-free silicon nitride microring resonators. Through the Purcell effect, high-purity hBN emitters exhibited a cavity-enhanced spectral coupling efficiency of up to 46% at room temperature, exceeding the theoretical limit (up to 40%) for cavity-free waveguide-emitter coupling and demonstrated nearly a 1 order of magnitude improvement over previous work. […]
Mathematics at the speed of light
Nanowerk January 16, 2023 Ultrathin optical metasurfaces have been recently explored to process large images in real time, in particular for edge detection. They can be tailored to solve complex mathematical problems in the analogue domain, although these efforts have so far been limited to guided-wave systems and bulky set-ups. An international team of researchers (the Netherlands, USA – University of Pennsylvania, City University of New York) developed an ultrathin Si metasurface-based platform for analogue computing that was able to solve Fredholm integral equations of the second kind using free-space visible radiation. A Si-based metagrating was inverse-designed to implement the […]
Nanoparticles make it easier to turn light into solvated electrons
Nanowerk January 17, 2023 Solvated electrons are powerful reducing agents capable of driving some of the most energetically expensive reduction reactions. It has been proposed that solvated electrons, which are powerful reducing agents, could be produced by photoexcitation of roughened metal electrodes, but no study has demonstrated a clear mechanism for their generation. A team of researchers in the US (Rice University, Stanford University, UT Austin) has shown that plasmons create solvated electrons in water. They showed that the yield of solvated electrons in water was increased more than 10 times for nanoparticle-decorated electrodes compared to smooth silver electrodes. Based […]