Science Daily February 10, 2022 A team of researchers in the US (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Bowdoin College, Harvard University) investigated the complex and highly ordered mineralized skeletal system of sea star from the tropical Indo-Pacific region. The skeleton consists of many millimeter-sized skeletal elements called ossicles which connect with soft tissue, allowing the animal to be flexible and move. Each ossicle is constructed of a microlattice structure so uniform that it can be described mathematically. They found that it is essentially a single crystal structure at atomic level which allows a sea star to reinforce its skeleton […]
Two-dimensional material could store quantum information at room temperature
Phys.org February 11, 2022 Spins in two-dimensional materials offer an advantage, as the reduced dimensionality enables feasible on-chip integration into devices. An international team of researchers (UK, Australia) has reported room-temperature optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) from single carbon-related defects in hexagonal boron nitride with up to 100 times stronger contrast than the ensemble average. They identified two distinct bunching timescales in the second-order intensity-correlation measurements for ODMR-active defects, but only one for those without an ODMR response. They observed either positive or negative ODMR signal for each defect. Based on kinematic models, they related this bipolarity to highly tunable […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of February, 11, 2022
01. Carbon nanotube films open up new prospects for electronics 02. Cooling matter from a distance 03. Nanowires under tension create the basis for ultrafast transistors 04. Scientists discover a mysterious transition in an electronic crystal 05. Scientists engineer new material that can absorb and release enormous amounts of energy 06. Study raises new possibilities for triggering room-temperature superconductivity with light 07. Super-elastic high-entropy Elinvar alloy discovered with potential for aerospace engineering 08. Tiny electrical vortexes bridge gap between ferroelectric and ferromagnetic materials 09. Towards self-sensing soft robots with electrochemically driven pumps 10. With a little help, new optical material […]
Carbon nanotube films open up new prospects for electronics
Nanowerk February 10, 2022 An international team of researchers (Russia, Finland) studied carbon nanotube films conductivity in the terahertz and infrared bands. Some of the films were made of nanotubes with lengths varying from 0.3 to 13 µm, while others were treated with oxygen plasma for 100 to 400 seconds and changed their electrodynamic properties in the process. They discovered that shortening tubes length (down to 0.3 µm) or exposing films to plasma (for longer than 100 s) leads to a drop in conductivity at low terahertz frequencies (< 0.3 THz). Exposure to plasma results in a larger number of […]
Cooling matter from a distance
Science Daily February 2, 2022 Researchers in Switzerland succeeded in forming a control loop consisting of two quantum systems separated by one meter. Within this loop a vibrating membrane was cooled by a cloud of atoms, and the two systems were coupled to one another by laser light. As one of the systems acts as a control unit for the other, no measurement is needed. Instead, the control system is configured to bring the target system into a desired state by means of coherent quantum mechanical interaction. They successfully used this coherent feedback mechanism to reduce the temperature of the […]
Hidden magnitude-8.2 earthquake source of mysterious 2021 global tsunami
Phys.org February 8, 2022 The 2021 August South Sandwich Island Mw 8.2 earthquake was a surprise, because it was initially reported as a magnitude 7.5 event at a deep depth (47 km) but generated a global-spreading tsunami that would only be expected for a larger and shallower event. By using seismic data researchers at Caltech revealed a hidden Mw 8.16 shallow slow event that happened between clusters of regular ruptures in the beginning and end. Although the slow event contributed 70% of the seismic moment, lasted three minutes, and ruptured a 200-km section of the plate interface, it is essentially […]
Nanowires under tension create the basis for ultrafast transistors
Phys.org February 7, 2022 Researchers in Germany produced nanowires consisting of a gallium arsenide core and an indium aluminum arsenide shell. The different chemical ingredients resulted in the crystal structures in the shell and the core having slightly different lattice spacings. This causes the shell to exert a high mechanical strain on the much thinner core changing the electronic properties of gallium arsenide in the core. They demonstrated that the strain in lattice-mismatched core/shell nanowires can affect the effective mass of electrons in a way that boosts their mobility to distinct levels. The electrons inside core of nanowires exhibited mobility […]
Nipah Virus–Another Threat From the World of Zoonotic Viruses
Frontiers in Microbiology January 25, 2022 The Nipah virus (NiV) belonging to the Paramyxoviridae family was reported in Malaysia in 1998/1999. According to the researchers in Poland due to its high mortality in humans, its zoonotic nature, the possibility of human-to-human transmission, and the lack of an available vaccine, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recognized Nipah virus as a global health problem. Depending on strain specificity, neurological symptoms and severe respiratory disorders are observed in NiV infection. In most confirmed cases of NiV epidemics, the appearance of the virus in humans was associated with the presence of various animal […]
Researchers use tiny magnetic swirls to generate true random numbers
Science Daily February 7, 2022 Researchers at Brown University have shown that the local dynamics of skyrmions, in contrast to the global dynamics of a skyrmion, can be introduced to provide effective functionalities for versatile computing. A single skyrmion interacting with local pinning centres under thermal effects can fluctuate in time and switch between a small-skyrmion and a large-skyrmion state, thereby serving as a robust true random number generator for probabilistic computing. Moreover, neighbouring skyrmions exhibit an anti-correlated coupling in their fluctuation dynamics. Both the switching probability and the dynamic coupling strength can be tuned by modifying the applied magnetic […]
Riding a laser to Mars
Phys.org February 8, 2022 Responding a NASA solicitation to send a sagecraft to Mars using laser, researchers in Canada are exploring laser-thermal propulsion. An Earth-based laser array of 10 m diameter and power 100 MW would be able to deliver laser power to spacecraft in cislunar space, where the incident laser is focused into a hydrogen heating chamber via an inflatable reflector. The hydrogen propellant is then exhausted through a nozzle to realize specific impulses of 3000 s. The architecture is shown to be immediately reusable via a burn-back maneuver to return the propulsion unit while still within range of […]