Science Daily April 18, 2019 When a magnet is hit with a short enough laser pulse the spins within a magnet will no longer point just up or down, but in all different directions canceling out the metal’s magnetic properties. Using mathematical modeling, numerical simulations and experiments an international team of researchers (USA – University of Colorado, NIST, SLAC, Temple University, UK, Sweden, U, Italy, Germany, China, Japan, Belgium) has shown that the spins behaved like a superfluid 3 picoseconds after a laser pulse hits and then form small clusters with the same orientation like “droplets” in which the spins […]
A “Laser for Sound” from a Levitated Nanoparticle
Optics and Photonics News April 19, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (University of Rochester, Los Alamos National Laboratory) used feedback loops to optomechanically manipulate the oscillations of a silica nanosphere levitated in an optical trap. In so doing, they were able to create laser-like amplification and coherence of phonons—quanta of vibrational or acoustic energy, analogous to photons in the optical domain. The team believes that the setup opens a general technique for creating frequency-tunable sound lasers in a system-size range that hasn’t previously been explored. The result, according to the researchers, could provide a useful tool both […]
Is defense acquisition at an ‘inflection point?’
Defense Systems April 19, 2019 A new Center for Strategic International Studies report found that in just two years, fiscal 2015 through 2017, Defense Department’s contract obligations increased more than 13 percent, three points higher than non-defense contracting. DOD’s total obligation authority grew just 5 percent. Starting in FY 2018, DOD put its focus on reform efforts and major organizational changes, namely acquisition system reform, moving to a commercial cloud (JEDI), and the 2018 defense spending bill’s general push for information technology services. Overall, the CSIS report found that defense acquisition is at an inflection point that will likely transform […]
Forecasting contagious ideas: ‘Infectivity’ models accurately predict tweet lifespan
Science Daily April 17, 2019 Models of contagion dynamics, originally developed for infectious diseases, have proven relevant to the study of information, news, and political opinions in online social systems. An international team of researchers (UK, USA – University of North Carolina) used about one month of Twitter data — comprising over 12 million tweets and more than 1.5 million retweets — and estimated each tweet’s infectivity based on the network dynamics of the first 50 retweets associated with it. They tested the ability of the infectivity-based model to predict the virality of retweet cascades and compared its performance to […]
Earth’s North Magnetic Pole Is Moving Fast, And We Might Finally Know Why
Science Alert April 23, 2019 Anchored by the north and south magnetic poles the magnetic field waxes and wanes in strength, undulating based on what’s going on in the core. The north magnetic pole movement made the World Magnetic Model – which tracks the field and informs compasses, smartphone GPS, and navigation systems on planes and ships. An international team of researchers (France, Denmark) attempted to simulate the physical conditions of Earth’s core by having supercomputers crunch 4 million hours’ worth of calculations. They found that sometimes there are pockets of liquid iron in the core that happen to be […]
Creating a cloak for grid data in the cloud
Phys.org April 19, 2019 Grid operators perform complex computations of very sensitive data to deliver power to consumers. Cloud-based tools can help manage the data and facilitate computation, but utility owners and system operators are concerned about security. Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory are developing framework which masks sensitive data and provides for secure computation. The Argonne framework warps, or “perturbs,” the model and data being sent for calculations, changing key variables and equations. A disguised version of the problem goes to a cloud-based “solver” computer, and the answer is returned to a local, secure server for decoding. During the […]
Cornell Engineers Create a Robotic Material That Displays 3 of The Key Traits For Life
Science Alert April 21, 2019 Researchers at Cornell University have created a new biomaterial called DASH: DNA-based Assembly and Synthesis of Hierarchical materials, that isn’t alive, but exhibits three key traits for life: metabolism, self-assembly, and organisation. It can crawl forward like a slime mold, grow new strands from the front as the old ones at the back decay and fall away. At the core of DASH are nanoscale building blocks that can rearrange materials into polymers and eventually larger shapes, all from chains of repeating DNA. The material is grown from a 55-nucleotide base seed sequence, which when combined […]
Catalyst renders nerve agents harmless
Phys.org April 22, 2019 Commonly used filtration method as protection against chemical agents is limited in, because once a filter reaches its capacity, it needs to be regenerated, removed, or replaced. A team of researchers in the US (Stony Brook University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, Virginia Tech, Emory University, Kennesaw State University) sought to decompose the nerve agent Sarin and its simulant, dimethyl chlorophosphate (DMCP) into non lethal chemicals using zirconium polytungstate. To identify why a catalyst works they hypothesized that the isolated zirconium atoms were the active sites for this catalyst and they isolated […]
Breakthrough research to revolutionise internet communication
Phys.org April 18, 2019 To reduce the power consumed by the internet an international team of researchers (Germany, Austria, New Zealand, Russia) has created a device called a microresonator optical frequency comb made of a tiny disc of crystal. The device transforms a single colour of laser light into a rainbow of 160 different frequencies – each beam totally in sync with each other and perfectly stable. One such device could replace hundreds of power-consuming lasers currently used to encode and send data around the world. They expect the devices to be incorporated in sub-oceanic landing stations where all the […]
Biosensor ‘bandage’ collects and analyzes sweat
Science Daily April 17, 2019 An international team of researchers (China, USA – Caltech, UC Davis) demonstrates a flexible and skin-mounted band that combines superhydrophobic-superhydrophilic microarrays with nanodendritic colorimetric biosensors toward in situ sweat sampling and analysis. On the superwettable bands, the superhydrophobic background could confine microdroplets into superhydrophilic microwells. The secreted sweat is repelled by the superhydrophobic silica coating and precisely collected and sampled onto the superhydrophilic micropatterns which provides an independent “vessel” toward cellphone-based sweat biodetection. Such wearable, superwettable band-based biosensors could significantly enhance epidemical sweat sampling in well-defined sites, holding promise for facile and noninvasive biofluids analysis…read […]