Phys.org July 21, 2022 A fundamental property of particles and antiparticles is their ability to annihilate one another. A similar behaviour is predicted for magnetic solitons1—localized spin textures that can be distinguished by their topological index Q. Theoretically, magnetic topological solitons with opposite values of Q, such as skyrmions and antiskyrmions, are expected to be able to continuously merge and annihilate. An international team of researchers (Germany, Sweden) demonstrated the creation and annihilation of skyrmion–antiskyrmion pairs in an exceptionally thin film of the cubic chiral magnet of B20-type FeGe. According to the researchers their observations are highly reproducible and are […]
Robots learn household tasks by watching humans
Phys.org July 22, 2022 Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new learning method for robots called WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning. WHIRL is an efficient algorithm for one-shot visual imitation. It can learn directly from human-interaction videos and generalize that information to new tasks, making robots well-suited to learning household chores. With WHIRL, a robot can observe those tasks and gather the video data it needs to eventually determine how to complete the job itself. The robot watched as a researcher opened the refrigerator door. It recorded his movements, the swing of the door, the […]
Shockwave caused by Tonga underwater eruption may help scientists predict future tsunamis
Phys.org July 14, 2022 Researchers in Japan believe that it may be possible to predict tsunamis faster by tracking the atmospheric disturbances caused by the airwaves they create and the errors in the positional information supplied by GPS satellites. Examining the errors following eruption they found that it caused waves of air pressure to spread as far as Australia and Japan. These waves oscillated the lower part of the ionosphere and generated an electric field that was then transmitted at high speed to the upper ionosphere. They detected the electron changes much earlier than the air pressure waves that caused […]
Supramolecular adhesive with usable temperature range of 400 degrees Celsius
Phys.org July 18, 2022 An international team of researchers in (China, Germany) has synthesized a new type of temperature-resistant crown-ether-protein (CEP) adhesive by harnessing synergistic host–guest molecular interactions between engineered crown ether and protein building blocks. The resulting adhesive demonstrated ultrahigh shearing adhesion strength of ≈22 MPa over a wide temperature range from −196 to 200 °C, superior to other established supramolecular or polymeric adhesives. The temperature-induced phase transition and internal bound water stabilized the system and led to superb adhesion under extreme conditions. The work offers a promising molecular engineering strategy to fabricate robust supramolecular adhesives for applications under extreme […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of July 15, 2022
01. Atomically-smooth gold crystals help to compress light for nanophotonic applications 02. Customized magneto-optical trap allows for cooling indium atoms to near absolute zero 03. Development of new biomaterial with super strength inspired by limpets 04. Longer lasting sodium-ion batteries on the horizon 05. Physicists discover a “family” of robust, superconducting graphene structures 06. A proof of odd-parity superconductivity 07. Researchers achieve record entanglement of quantum memories 08. Researchers create VX neurotoxin detector 09. Researchers find the missing photonic link to enable an all-silicon quantum internet 10. A robot learns to imagine itself And others… Biodefense Headlines – 12 July […]
Atomically-smooth gold crystals help to compress light for nanophotonic applications
Phys.org July 13, 2022 An international team of researchers (South Korea, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, USA – University of Minnesota) used a highly sensitive scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM) to directly measure the optical fields of the hyperbolic image phonon-polaritons (HIP) propagating in a 63 nm-thick slab of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) on a monocrystalline gold substrate, showing the mid-infrared light waves in dielectric crystal compressed by a hundred times. They showed that the phonon-polaritons in van der Waals crystals can be significantly more compressed without sacrificing their lifetime. Practically zero surface scattering and extremely small ohmic loss in gold at […]
Biodefense Headlines – 12 July 2022
Global Biodefense July 12,022 This week’s selections include reforming international legal frameworks for outbreak reporting; LRN monkeypox testing in the US; ISIS chemical weapons ambitions; and Chikungunya VLP vaccine development….read more.
Customized magneto-optical trap allows for cooling indium atoms to near absolute zero
Phys.org July 13, 2022 Cooling some atomic gases confers unique and sometimes useful properties to the atoms. The use of magneto optical traps (MOTs) for cooling works on only a small number of atomic groups on the periodic table. Rather than a ground state transition, researchers in Singapore used a transition from a more long-lived metastable state in their MOT. This required modifying it to work with just indium atoms. Once the reconfiguration was completed, the researchers created a cloud made up of more than 500 million indium-115 atoms in their MOT and cooled the atoms to approximately 1 mK […]
Development of new biomaterial with super strength inspired by limpets
Phys.org July 7, 2022 The small aquatic snail-like mollusks use a tongue bristling with tiny, microscopic teeth to scrape food off rocks and into their mouths. These teeth contain a hard yet flexible composite, which in 2015 was found to be the strongest known biologically occurring material, far stronger than spider silk and comparable to man-made substances, including carbon fiber and Kevlar. An international team of researchers (UK, Poland USA – industry, Switzerland) has replicated the limpet tooth developmental processes ex vivo, where isolated limpet tissue and cells in culture generated new biomimetic structures. Transcriptomic analysis of each developmental stage […]
Longer lasting sodium-ion batteries on the horizon
Science Daily July 13, 2022 The severe instability of the solid–electrolyte interphase (SEI) formed during repeated cycling in sodium ion batteries (NIBs) hinders their development. In particular, the SEI dissolution in NIBs with a high-voltage cathode is more severe than in the case of Li-ion batteries (LIBs) and leads to continuous side reactions, electrolyte depletion and irreversible capacity loss, making NIBs less stable than LIBs. A team of researchers in the US (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Washington) developed a rational electrolyte design to suppress the SEI dissolution and enhance NIB performance. Their electrolyte lowered the solvation ability for […]