01. Bacteria-killing drills get an upgrade 02. Chip-scale Floquet topological insulators to enhance 5G wireless communications 03. It’s a trap! Laser light ensnared by invisible bonds 04. Light instead of electricity: A new kind of ‘green hydrogen’ 05. A new arrangement: Using quantum dots to quench the smallest ferrimagnetism 06. New route to build materials out of tiny particles 07. A new ultra-thin electrode material: A step closer to next-generation semiconductors 08. Researchers identify alternative to lithium-based battery technology 09. Want to prevent pandemics? Stop spillovers 10. Writing with light on titania: Rewritable UV-sensitive surfaces made from doped TiO2 nanocrystals […]
Bacteria-killing drills get an upgrade
Nanowerk June 1, 2022 An international team of researchers USA – Rice University, Spain) discovered a distinctive antibacterial therapy that uses visible (405 nanometers) light-activated synthetic molecular machines (MMs) to kill Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, in minutes, vastly outpacing conventional antibiotics. They rapidly eliminate persister cells and established bacterial biofilms. The antibacterial mode of action of MMs involves physical disruption of the membrane. By permeabilizing the membrane, MMs at sublethal doses potentiate the action of conventional antibiotics. Repeated exposure to antibacterial MMs is not accompanied by resistance development. Therapeutic doses of MMs mitigate mortality associated with […]
Chip-scale Floquet topological insulators to enhance 5G wireless communications
Phys.org May 30, 2022 A team of researchers in the US (Columbia University, City University of New York, UT Austin, industry) introduced Floquet topological insulators for radio-waves with a unique design, based on the quasi-electrostatic propagation of radio signals in switched-capacitor networks. In their previous work they developed photonic topological insulators (PTI) chips that could be used to create full-duplex phased-array wireless technology, which combines two different 5G wireless capabilities: full-duplex and multi-antenna operation. PTIs do not allow the propagation of electromagnetic waves in their bulk, but they ensure efficient and robust wave propagation on their boundaries, however shaped. These […]
A cloudless future? The mystery at the heart of climate forecasts
Science Daily May 31, 2022 Analyses of global climate models consistently show that clouds constitute the biggest source of uncertainty and instability. But they occur on a length- and timescale that today’s models can’t come close to reproducing. Therefore, they included in models through a variety of approximations. A team of researchers in the US (UC Irvine, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of Washington, industry) is working to fix this glaring gap by breaking the climate modeling problem into two parts: a coarse-grained, lower-resolution (100km) planetary model and many small patches with 100 to 200 meter resolution. They developed a […]
It’s a trap! Laser light ensnared by invisible bonds
Science Daily June 1, 2022 Anderson localization predicts that transport in one-dimensional uncorrelated disordered systems comes to a complete halt, experiencing no transport whatsoever. However, a disordered physical system is always correlated because it must have a finite spectrum. Localization is dominant only for wave packets whose spectral extent resides within the region of the wave number span of the disorder. An international team of researchers (Israel, Germany, Spain) has experimentally shown that Anderson localization can occur and even be dominant for wave packets residing entirely outside the spectral extent of the disorder. The team studied the evolution of wave […]
Leading journal Nature will make sex and gender reporting mandatory in research
Phys.org May 27, 2022 According to Nature journals’ new policy, starting in June, researchers who submit papers to a subset of the Nature Portfolio journals https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/ethics-and-biosecurity will need to describe whether, and how, sex and gender are considered in study design. If no sex and gender analyses were carried out, authors will need to clarify why. This will apply to work with human participants, as well as other vertebrate animals and cell experimental studies. “Sex” and “gender” are terms that are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Sex refers to biological attributes, including genetics and reproductive […]
Light instead of electricity: A new kind of ‘green hydrogen’
Phys.org May 31, 2022 Photocatalytic water splitting concept is not yet used industrially. An international team of researchers (Austria, Germany, Japan) has found a new combination of molecular and solid-state catalysts to transform water into O2 molecules, and hydrogen ions into H2 molecules. They anchored clusters made up of cobalt, tungsten and oxygen for oxidizing oxygen, and clusters of sulfur and molybdenum for creating hydrogen molecules on a surface of light-absorbing support structures such as titanium oxide. The energy of the absorbed light led to the creation of free-moving electrons and free-moving positive charges in the titanium oxide. These charges […]
Long-distance collaboration makes scientific breakthroughs more likely
Phys.org May 31, 2022 Disruptive ideas and scientific breakthroughs are becoming increasingly rare and harder to find, with incremental discovery now more common than groundbreaking new findings. In an analysis of data for more than ten million research teams, across eleven academic fields from 1961 to 2020, researchers in the UK determined that over the past decade remote collaboration between academic teams has led to more scientific breakthroughs. This is a reversal of what was observed from the 1960s to the 2000s, when remote collaboration led to fewer scientific breakthroughs and more incremental innovation. New teams tend to create more […]
A new arrangement: Using quantum dots to quench the smallest ferrimagnetism
Phys.org May 31, 2022 Researchers in Japan mathematically modeled the electron scattering Kondo effect in ferrimagnetic substances. They used a novel T-shaped lattice of four quantum-dots connected to two reservoirs of electrons to induce a current. While pairs of quantum-dots have been used to model quantum phenomena before, the T-shaped arrangement was new and allowed ferrimagnetism to emerge. Due to the symmetrical geometric configuration of the system, they expected to go from the minimal ferrimagnetic state to the Kondo state without going through other quantum entangled states, amplifying the electrical conductivity as usual. But it was suppressed, contrary to their […]
New route to build materials out of tiny particles
Phys.org May 27, 2022 Creating materials with structure that is independently controllable at a range of scales requires breaking naturally occurring hierarchies. Breaking these hierarchies can be achieved via the decoupling of building block attributes from structure during assembly. An international team of researchers (the Netherlands, USA (University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Canada) demonstrated that shape and interaction decoupling occur in colloidal cuboids suspended in evaporating emulsion droplets. The resulting colloidal clusters serve as “preassembled” mesoscale building blocks for larger-scale structures. They showed that clusters of up to nine particles form mesoscale building blocks with geometries that are independent […]