Science Daily February 14, 2020 Megaprojects are the delivery model used to produce large-scale, complex, and one-off capital investments in a variety of public and private sectors. With a total capital cost of US$1 billion or more, megaprojects are extremely risky ventures, notoriously difficult to manage, and often fail to achieve their original objectives. Researchers in the UK reviewed and analyzed 6,007 titles and abstracts and 86 full papers, identifying a total of 18 causes and 54 cures to address poor megaproject performance. They suggest five avenues for future research that should consider examining megaprojects as large-scale, inter-organizational production systems: […]
Skyrmions like it hot: Spin structures are controllable even at high temperatures
Nanowerk February 13, 2020 When a skyrmion is driven by an electric current it propagates at skyrmion Hall angle (SkHA). This drive dependence, as well as thermal effects due to Joule heating, could be used to tailor skyrmion trajectories, but are not well understood. An international team of researchers (Germany, Belgium, USA – MIT, Czech Republic) had previously demonstrated the use of new spin structures for future magnetic storage devices. In their new research they report skyrmion dynamics as a function of temperature and drive amplitude. They found the skyrmion velocity depends strongly on temperature, while the skyrmion Hall angle […]
A spookily good sensor
Phys.org February 19, 2020 Researchers in Japan placed a millimeter-sized sphere of yttrium iron garnet in the same resonant cavity as a superconducting Josephson junction qubit, which acted as the sensor. Because of the coupling of the sphere to resonant cavity, and, in turn, between the cavity to the qubit, the qubit could only be excited by an electromagnetic pulse if no magnetic excitations were present in the sphere. Reading the state of the qubit then reveals the state of the sphere. By using single-shot detection instead of averaging, they were able to make the device both highly sensitive and […]
University of Illinois researchers demonstrate new capability for cooling electronics
EurekAlert February 1, 2020 Air jet cooling systems are not widely used today because of their complexity and weight. A team of researchers in the US (Arizona State University, University of Illinois) has demonstrated a new type of air jet cooler that overcomes previous barriers to jet cooling systems. Using additive manufacturing and strong polymer materials, the researchers created an air jet cooling system that can direct high-speed air onto multiple electronics hot spots. The cooling system can withstand the harsh conditions associated with high-speed air jets. The design freedom of additive manufacturing allows creating cooling solutions that have sizes […]
Van der Waals magnets, a material for future semiconductors
Nanowerk February 16, 2020 When van der Waals materials are combined with other 2D materials, they can create new materials that show previously undiscovered properties. However, most van der Waals magnetic materials have some constraints in terms of spintronics application because of their low Curie temperature and high coercivity making them unsuitable for use in certain devices. An international team of researchers (South Korea, USA – Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) found that Fe3–xGeTe2 nanoflakes show a significant suppression of the magnetic anisotropy with hole doping. Electronic structure measurements and calculations revealed that the chemical potential shift associated […]
What if we could teach photons to behave like electrons?
Phys.org February 19, 2020 An international team of researchers (USA – Stanford University, China) tricked the photons—which are intrinsically non-magnetic—into behaving like charged electrons by sending the photons through carefully designed mazes in a way that caused the light particles to behave as if they were being acted upon by what the scientists called a “synthetic” or “artificial” magnetic field. They designed structures that created magnetic forces capable of pushing photons in predictable and useful ways. To bring photons into the proximities required to create these magnetic effects, the researchers used lasers, fiber optic cables and other off-the-shelf scientific equipment. […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of February 14, 2020
01. Scientists develop first electrically-driven ‘topological’ laser 02. Experimental fingerprint test can distinguish between those who have taken or handled cocaine 03. Hackers could shut down satellites–or turn them into weapons 04. Movement of a liquid droplet generates over 5 volts of electricity 05. A gold butterfly can make its own semiconductor skin 06. Researchers develop smaller, lighter radiation shielding 07. Using sound and light to generate ultra-fast data transfer 08. Using long-wavelength terahertz radiation to produce video with a high frame rate 09. First-of-its-kind hydrogel platform enables on-demand production of medicines, chemicals 10. New droplet-based electricity generator: A drop […]
Army Medical Department Board Tests Nerve Agent Antidote Auto-Injectors
Global Biodefense February 11, 2020 The United States military adopted the auto-injector as the drug delivery device for chemical weapons exposure because of ease of use, packaging durability,and drug stability under varying storage conditions. The auto-injectors are designed to deliver an intramuscular injection with a 22-gauge needle protrudes with a pressure-activated coil spring mechanism that triggers the needle after removal of the safety cap. It is a replacement for the currently fielded auto-injector for treatment against nerve agent and insecticide poisoning, adjunctive treatment, and management of agent-induced seizures…read more.
Experimental fingerprint test can distinguish between those who have taken or handled cocaine
Science Daily February 6, 2020 An international team of researchers (UK, Ireland) has designed a test that can tell whether an individual has consumed the class A drug, or simply handled it. They took fingerprints from people who had testified to ingesting cocaine during the previous 24 hours. Fingerprints were collected again after the participants washed their hands thoroughly with soap and water. This same process was used to collect samples from a pool of non- drug users who had touched street cocaine. By cross-referencing the information from the non-users who had touched cocaine with that of volunteers who testified […]
First-of-its-kind hydrogel platform enables on-demand production of medicines, chemicals
Science Daily February 9, 2020 A team of researchers in the US (University of Washington, UT Austin) has developed a hydrogel system, portable “biofactory”, for harnessing the bioactivity of embedded microbes for on-demand small molecule and peptide production in microbial mono-culture and consortia. This platform bypasses the challenges of engineering a multi-organism consortia by utilizing a temperature-responsive, shear-thinning hydrogel to compartmentalize organisms into polymeric hydrogels that control the final consortium composition and dynamics without the need for synthetic control of mutualism. They have demonstrated that these hydrogels provide protection from preservation techniques (including lyophilization) and can sustain metabolic function for […]