Phys.org September 22, 2021 One of the fundamental principles enabling entanglement-based quantum communication security is the fact that interfering with one photon will destroy entanglement and thus be detectable. However, this property is also the greatest obstacle. Random encounters of traveling photons, losses, and technical imperfections make noise an inevitable part of any quantum communication scheme, severely limiting distance, key rate, and environmental conditions in which quantum key distribution can be employed. Using photons entangled in their spatial degree of freedom, an international team of researchers (China, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Slovakia) has shown that the increased noise resistance of […]
Physicists make square droplets and liquid lattices
Nanowerk September 15, 2021 To study if the non-equilibrium structures can be controlled or be useful researchers in Finland subjected combinations of oils with different dielectric constants and conductivities to an electric field. When an electric field turned on over the mixture, electrical charge accumulated at the interface between the oils shearing the interface out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The liquids were confined into a thin, nearly two-dimensional sheet taking various droplets and patterns. The droplets could be made into squares and hexagons with straight sides. The two liquids could be also made to form into interconnected lattices, grid patterns that […]
Scientists develop the next generation of reservoir computing
Phys.org September 21, 2021 Reservoir computing is a machine learning algorithm developed in the early 2000s and used to solve the “hardest of the hard” computing problems. It requires very small training data sets, uses linear optimization, and thus requires minimal computing resources. It does that using an artificial neural network which is a black box. A team of researchers in the US (Ohio State University, industry, Clackson University) investigated the “black box” and found that the whole reservoir computing system could be greatly simplified, dramatically reducing the need for computing resources and saving significant time. They tested their concept […]
Scientists still don’t know how far melting in Antarctica will go, or the sea level rise it will unleash
Phys.org September 21, 2021 Ice loss from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets was the largest contributor to sea level rise in recent decades. Adapting to the projected sea level rise that will have widespread effects in Australia and around the world due to ice sheet melt are so wide that developing ways for societies to adapt will be incredibly expensive and difficult. An international scientific collaboration known as the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (ISMIP6) is quantifying how much Antarctic ice sheets will contribute to sea level rise has identified basal melt, the melting of ice shelves from underneath, […]
Winged microchip is smallest-ever human-made flying structure
Science Daily September 22, 2021 An international team of researchers (South Korea, UK, USA – Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin, University of Connecticut, University of Illinois, University of Purdue, China, Hong Kong) studied wind-dispersed seeds to build microfliers and optimized its aerodynamics to ensure that it falls at a slow velocity in a controlled manner. They fabricated precursors to flying structures in flat, planar geometries and bonded them onto a slightly stretched rubber substrate. When the stretched substrate is relaxed, a controlled buckling process occurred causing the wings to “pop up” into precisely defined three-dimensional forms. It included sensors, a […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of September 17, 2021
01. Just by changing its shape, scientists show they can alter material properties 02. Laser loops create ultrafast electric currents in solid materials 03. Magnetic field turns handed superconductor into liquid crystal-like nematic state 04. New DNA-based chip can be programmed to solve complex math problems 05. Researchers create nanoparticle paste to make perovskite solar cells more efficient 06. Scientists Built a New Kind of Invisibility Cloak, But It’s Not For Your Eyes 07. Scientists solve mystery of icy plumes that may foretell deadly supercell storms 08. A three-qubit entangled state has been realized in a fully controllable array of […]
AI system identifies buildings damaged by wildfire
Phys.org September 16, 2021 Existing technologies lack accuracy and ability to scale to effectively aid disaster relief and recovery. Even today, most wildfire event inspectors visit sites and manually classify building damage using before and after images of the buildings. A team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, California Polytechnic State University) has developed DamageMap, an artificial intelligence-powered post-wildfire building damage classifier. It is a binary classifier. Unlike existing solutions DamageMap relies on post-wildfire images alone by separating the segmentation and classification tasks. The model has an overall accuracy of 98% on the validation set (five wildfire events all […]
Creating cotton that is fireproof and comfortable
Phys.org September 15, 2021 Researchers in Switzerland utilized a tri-functional phosphorous compound (trivinylphosphine oxide), which has the capability of reacting only with specifically added molecules (nitrogen compounds like piperazin) to form its own network inside cotton. This makes the cotton permanently fire-resistant without blocking the favorable -OH groups. This flame retardant treatment does not include carcinogenic formaldehyde. The phosphine oxide networks do not wash out. After 50 launderings, 95 percent of the flame retardant network was still present in the fabric. To fix the phosphine oxide networks inside the cellulose they treated the cotton with an aqueous solution of phosphorus […]
Engineering a polymer network to act as active camouflage on demand
Phys.org September 16, 2021 Despite extensive efforts to create colour-changing materials and devices, it is challenging to achieve pixelated structural coloration with broadband spectral shifts in a compact space. An international team of researchers (USA – University of Pennsylvania, South Korea) describes pneumatically inflating thin membranes of main-chain chiral nematic liquid crystalline elastomers that have such properties. By taking advantage of the large elasticity anisotropy and Poisson’s ratio (>0.5) of these materials, they geometrically programed the size and the layout of the encapsulated air channels to achieve colour shifting from near-infrared to ultraviolet wavelengths with less than 20% equi-biaxial transverse […]
Jet stream changes could amplify weather extremes by 2060s
Phys.org September 13, 2021 A team of researchers in the US (MIT, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Arizona, University of Hawaii, Desert Research Institute) collected glacial ice core samples from nearly 50 sites spanning the Greenland ice sheet to reconstruct changes in windiness across the North Atlantic dating back to the eighth century. Model projections forecast a northward migration of the North Atlantic jet stream which could render the jet stream significantly different within a matter of decades. The ice core layers tell us about how much precipitation fell each year and about the temperatures that airmasses were exposed […]