Defense News February 13. 2024 Air Force plans to award contracts for the next round of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) — drones loaded with autonomous software that would fly themselves into battle alongside crewed fighters — in fiscal 2025. On the first increment of CCAs, the Air Force has contracts with five companies: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril. The Air Force plans to field several different types of CCAs, with different capabilities and levels of survivability, to carry out a wide range of missions including strikes, surveillance, jamming, and serving as decoys to draw enemy fire. […]
With just a little electricity, researchers boost common catalytic reactions
Science Daily February 15, 2024 Electric fields play a key role in enzymatic catalysis and can enhance reaction rates by 100,000-fold, but the same rate enhancements have yet to be achieved in thermochemical heterogeneous catalysis. Researchers at MIT probed the influence of catalyst potential and interfacial electric fields on heterogeneous Brønsted acid catalysis. They found that variations in applied potential of ~380 mV led to a 100,000-fold rate enhancement for 1-methylcyclopentanol dehydration, which was catalyzed by carbon-supported phosphotungstic acid. Mechanistic studies supported a model in which the interfacial electrostatic potential drop drove quasi-equilibrated proton transfer to the adsorbed substrate prior […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of February 16, 2024
01. A new optical metamaterial makes true one-way glass possible 02. New adhesive tape picks up and sticks down 2D materials as easily as child’s play 03. Researchers develop eco-friendly ‘magnet’ to battle microplastics 04. Researchers solve a foundational problem in transmitting quantum information 05. Scientists Slowed Down Light by 10,000 Times in an Experiment 06. Single proton illuminates perovskite nanocrystals-based transmissive thin scintillators 07. Spiral-shaped lens provides clear vision at a range of distances and lighting conditions 08. What did the electron ‘say’ to the phonon in the graphene sandwich? 09. China conducts first nationwide review of retractions and […]
Australian researchers develop new method to more accurately spot underground nuclear tests
Phys.org February 7, 2024 Currently possible mis-classification of explosions as earthquakes currently limits the use of screening methods for verification of test-ban treaties. Researchers in Australia showed that populations of moment tensors for both earthquakes and explosions are anisotropically distributed on the hypersphere. They described a method that uses these elliptical distributions in combination with a Bayesian classifier to achieve successful classification rates of 99 per cent for explosions and 98 per cent for earthquakes using existing catalogues of events from the western United States. The 1983 May 5 Crowdie underground nuclear test and 2018 July 20 DAG-1 deep-borehole chemical […]
Breakthrough in single-photon integration holds promise for quantum computing, cryptography
Phys.org February 12, 2024 An international team of researchers (Israel, Germany, USA- Los Alamos National Laboratory) demonstrated an important step toward on-chip integration of single-photon sources at room temperature. Excellent photon directionality was achieved with a hybrid metal–dielectric bullseye antenna, while back-excitation was permitted by placement of the emitter in a subwavelength hole positioned at its center. The design enabled a direct back-excitation and very efficient front coupling of emission either to a low numerical aperture (NA) optics or directly to an optical fiber. They fabricated devices containing either a colloidal quantum dot or a nanodiamond containing silicon-vacancy centers. Both […]
Charting the course to eco-friendly steel: China’s blueprint for cleaner air and a cooler planet
Phys.org February 7, 2024 Researchers in China described their integrated emission inventory that included air pollutants and CO2 emissions from 811 ISI enterprises and five key manufacturing processes in 2020. According to them sintering was the primary source of air pollution in the ISI. 81% of total CO2 emissions come from blast furnaces. Contributions of ISI have resulted in an increase in national population weighted PM2.5 concentration, causing approximately 59,035 premature deaths in 2020. Emissions from other provinces contributed to 48% of PM2.5-related deaths in China. According to them it is crucial for ISI manufacturers to prioritize the removal of […]
China conducts first nationwide review of retractions and research misconduct
Nature February 12, 2024 A Nature analysis reveals that since 2021 there have been more than 17,000 retractions with Chinese co-authors. The [Chinese] government launched the nationwide self-review in response to Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, retracting many papers by Chinese authors. A Nature analysis shows that last year, Hindawi issued more than 9,600 retractions, of which the vast majority — about 8,200 — had a co-author in China. Nearly 14,000 retraction notices, of which some three-quarters involved a Chinese co-author, were issued by all publishers in 2023. According to Nature’s analysis, which includes only English-language journals, […]
The escalating impact of global warming on atmospheric rivers
Phys.org February 13, 2024 Researchers in Hong Kong assessed the performance of atmospheric rivers (ARs) in Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) models on both seasonal and interannual timescales within the historical period and investigated the future projection of ARs under different emission scenarios on a global scale. The multi-model mean results obtained using the PanLu detection algorithm consistently exhibited agreement with the observational AR climatology and captured interannual fluctuations as well as the relationships with large-scale drivers. The future projections revealed increased AR frequency, intensity, duration, and spatial extent and decreased landfall intervals with regional variations […]
New adhesive tape picks up and sticks down 2D materials as easily as child’s play
Science Daily February 9, 2024 The use of graphene and other 2D materials to create electronic and optoelectronic devices has been limited by the lack of effective large-area transfer processes. An international team of researchers (South Korea, Japan) has developed a method that uses functional tapes with adhesive forces controlled by ultraviolet light. The adhesion of the tape was optimized for the transfer of monolayer graphene, providing a yield of over 99%. Once detached from the growth substrate, the graphene/tape stack enables easy transfer of graphene to the desired target substrate. The method could be used to transfer other 2D […]
A new optical metamaterial makes true one-way glass possible
Phys.org February 14, 2024 The nonreciprocal magnetoelectric effect, also known as the Tellegen effect, promises several groundbreaking phenomena connected to fundamental and applied physics. An international team of researchers (Finland, Sweden, USA – University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University) proposed a three-dimensional metamaterial with an isotropic and resonant Tellegen response in the visible frequency range. The metamaterial was formed by randomly oriented bimaterial nanocylinders in a host medium. Each nanocylinder consisted of a ferromagnet in a single-domain magnetic state and a high-permittivity dielectric operating near the magnetic Mie-type resonance. The proposed metamaterial required no external magnetic bias and operated on the […]