Inside Science May 13, 2020 Social media platforms have removed the video for violating misinformation policies, but the 26-minute video highlights one way that the anti-vaccine movement is feeding into the recent surge of misinformation and disinformation swirling around COVID-19. In a new analysis researchers at Johns Hopkins University provide the first map of how three types of online communities interact: those who promote accurate information about vaccines, those who are against vaccines, and those who are interested in vaccines but don’t obviously lean in either direction, whom the researchers termed undecided. They found that pro-vaccine pages were not well […]
A billion years missing from geologic record: Where it may have gone
Science Daily May 7, 2020 The Great Unconformity, as it is known, accounts for more than one billion years of missing rock in certain places. Scientists have developed several hypotheses to explain how, and when, this staggering amount of material may have been eroded. Using the ratio of helium to thorium and uranium in certain minerals as a paleo-thermometer a team of researchers in the US (University of Colorado, UC Santa Barbara) tracked how rock moved in the crust as it was buried and eroded through the ages. They extracted grains of a particularly resilient mineral, zircon, from the stone […]
Chameleon materials: The origin of color variation in low-dimensional perovskites
Phys.org May 11, 2020 Perovskites ability to emit light over a broad wavelength range is widely attributed to broad luminescence with a large Stokes shift to self-trapped excitons forming due to strong carrier–phonon interactions. Researchers in the Netherlands highlight the extrinsic origin of their broad band emission. As shown by below-gap excitation, in-gap states in the crystal bulk are responsible for the broad emission. This insight advances the understanding of the emission properties of low-dimensional perovskites and question the generality of the attribution of broad band emission in metal halide perovskite and related compounds to self-trapped excitons…read more. Open Access […]
Chemistry breakthrough with nanodroplets could speed up drug development
Nanowerk May 8, 2020 Researchers in the UK have developed a new method called Encapsulated Nanodroplet Crystallisation (ENaCt), that can set up hundreds of crystallisation experiments within a few minutes. Each experiment involves a few micrograms of molecular analyte dissolved in a few nanolitres of organic solvent. The process is automated allowing for rapid set up of hundreds of unique experiments. Concentration of these nanodroplet experiments results in the growth of the desired high quality single crystals that are suitable for modern X-ray diffraction analysis. Tthe ability to do so with such small quantities of analyte is ground-breaking. The technique has […]
COVIDScholar: AI Tool Sifts Through Thousands of Papers to Guide Researchers
Global Biodefense May 12, 2020 Every day, hundreds of scientific papers about COVID-19 come out, in both traditional journals and non-peer-reviewed preprints. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab are using the latest artificial intelligence techniques to build COVIDScholar, a search engine dedicated to COVID-19. It includes tools that pick up subtle clues like similar drugs or research methodologies to recommend relevant research to scientists. AI can capture latent scientific knowledge from text, making connections that humans missed. They built web scrapers that collect new papers as they are published from a wide variety of sources, making them available on the […]
Engineers Unveil a System That Delivers Electricity Wirelessly – To a Moving Target
Science Alert May 8, 2020 Wireless power transfer set-ups typically suffer from an inherent sensitivity to the relative movement of the device with respect to the power source. Researchers at Stanford University show that robust and efficient wireless power transfer can be achieved by using a power-efficient switch-mode amplifier with current-sensing feedback in a parity–time symmetric circuit. In this circuit, the parity–time symmetry guarantees that the effective load impedance on the switch-mode amplifier remains constant, and hence the amplifier maintains high efficiency despite variation of the transfer distance. They experimentally demonstrated that such a circuit could wirelessly transfer around 10 W […]
Making quantum ‘waves’ in ultrathin materials
EurekAlert May 14, 2020 To understand how plasmons operate in quasi 2D crystals an international team of researchers (USA – UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, research organization, Germany) characterized the properties of both nonconductive and conductive electrons in a monolayer of the TMD tantalum disulfide. Using the new algorithms they developed to compute the material’s electronic properties, they found the plasmons in quasi 2D TMDs are much more stable – for as long as approximately 2 picoseconds than previously thought. Their findings also suggest that plasmons generated by quasi 2D TMDs could enhance the intensity of light by more […]
NIST scientists create new recipe for single-atom transistors
EurekAlert May 11, 2020 Using a room temperature grown locking layer and precise control over the entire fabrication process, a team of researchers in the US (NIST, University of Maryland) reduced unintentional dopant movement while achieving high quality epitaxy in scanning tunneling microscope (STM)-patterned devices. They demonstrated the exponential scaling of the tunneling resistance on the tunnel gap as it is varied from 7 dimer rows to 16 dimer rows, the capability to reproducibly pattern devices with atomic precision and a donor-based fabrication process where atomic scale changes in the patterned tunnel gap result in the expected changes in the […]
The observation of photon-assisted tunneling signatures in Majorana wires
Phys.org May 12, 2020 An International team of researchers (Denmark, USA – UC Santa Barbara, MIT, Caltech, Sweden) has developed a scheme for preparation, manipulation, and read out of Majorana zero modes in semiconducting wires with mesoscopic superconducting islands. They outline a sequence of milestones interpolating between zero-mode detection and quantum computing that includes (1) detection of fusion rules for non-Abelian anyons using either proximal charge sensors or pumped current, (2) validation of a prototype topological qubit, and (3) demonstration of non-Abelian statistics by braiding in a branched geometry. The pre-braiding experiments can be adapted to other manipulation and read […]
Potentially fatal combinations of humidity and heat are emerging across the globe
Science Daily May 8, 2020 Humans’ ability to efficiently shed heat has enabled us to range over every continent, but a wet-bulb temperature (TW) of 35°C marks our upper physiological limit, and much lower values have serious health and productivity impacts. An international team of researchers (USA – Caltech. Columbia University, UK) found that a comprehensive evaluation of weather station data shows that some coastal subtropical locations have already reported a TW of 35°C and that extreme humid heat overall has more than doubled in frequency since 1979. The most extreme humid heat is highly localized in both space and […]