EurekAlert December 6, 2019 According to the DOE the rapid development of technologies for high-throughput screening of genomes, proteins, metabolites, and other biological features has generated and continues to generate mountains of data. The research will focus on data from plants and microbes relevant to DOE missions in energy and environment, including laying the scientific groundwork for cost-effective production of biofuels and bioproducts as well as enhancing understanding of the biological dimensions of environmental cleanup, among other topics. It is expected that many of the new software tools and approaches will ultimately be integrated into the DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase an […]
Electronic map reveals ‘rules of the road’ in superconductor
Science Daily December 6, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – Rice University, UC Berkeley, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stanford University, China) has developed a band structure map from the data gathered from measurements of a single crystal of iron selenide as it was cooled to the point of superconductivity. They are making observations of different types of exotic materials and figuring out the quantum mechanical rules that govern electron behavior in those materials. The electronic structure helps deciding if a material will be a good conductor or a good insulator or a superconductor…read more. […]
In surprise breakthrough, scientists create quantum states in everyday electronics
Phys.org December 9, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, Japan, Sweden, Hungary) has demonstrated they could electrically control quantum states embedded in silicon carbide. The quantum states in silicon carbide have the added benefit of emitting single particles of light with a wavelength near the telecommunications band which makes them well suited to long-distance transmission through the same fiber-optic network. They found that by using the diode, a one-way switch for electrons the quantum signal suddenly became free of noise and was almost perfectly stable mitigating the impurity issue. The work […]
New method to remove dust on solar panels
Science Daily December 9, 2019 To better understand the forces that attach and detach particles from surfaces during the self-cleaning mechanism and the effect of nanotextures on these forces, researchers in Israel prepared four silicon-based samples relevant to solar panels: (1) smooth hydrophilic (2) nanotextured hydrophilic surfaces and (3) smooth hydrophobic (4) nanotextured hydrophobic surfaces. They found that hydrophilic particle removal increased from ∼41%, from hydrophilic smooth Si wafers to 98% from superhydrophobic Si-based nanotextured surfaces. They determined that the reason for the increased particle removal is due to the reduction of the adhesion force between the particle and the […]
This object-recognition dataset stumped the world’s best computer vision models
MIT News December 10, 2019 In the real-world object detectors’ performance drops noticeably creating reliability concerns for self-driving cars and other safety-critical systems that use machine vision. A team of researchers (MIT, IBM) created ObjectNet consisting of about 50,000 photos of objects shown tipped on their side, shot at odd angles, and displayed in clutter-strewn rooms and it contains no training images. When leading object-detection models were tested on ObjectNet, their accuracy rates fell from a high of 97 percent on ImageNet to just 50-55 percent. The researchers hope that the new dataset will result in robust computer vision without […]
Open international research collaboration essential, must have safeguards, independent report finds
NSF News December 11, 2019 As part of its ongoing effort to enhance the agency’s understanding of the threats to basic research posed by foreign governments that have taken actions that violate the principles of scientific ethics and research integrity, the NSF today released a report by JASON titled “Fundamental Research Security.” Four main themes emerged from the JASON study: The value of, and need for, foreign scientific talent in the U.S.; The significant negative impacts of placing new restrictions on access to fundamental research; The need to extend our notion of research integrity to include disclosures of commitments and potential […]
Physicists image electrons flowing like water for the first time
Phys.org December 10, 2019 While numerous techniques have been devised to image electron flows, the need remains for a nanoscale probe capable of simultaneously imaging current and voltage distributions with high sensitivity and minimal invasiveness, in a magnetic field, across a broad range of temperatures and beneath an insulating surface. An international team of researchers (Israel, UK, Japan, USA – Berkeley, Canada) produced a nanoscale detector built from a carbon nanotube transistor that can image the properties of flowing electrons with unprecedented sensitivity. They demonstrated the ability of their technique to visualize local aspects of intrinsically nonlocal transport, as in […]
Reorganizing a computer chip: Transistors can now both process and store information
Science Daily December 9, 2019 Researchers at Purdue University used a semiconductor that has ferroelectric properties. This way two materials become one material so that the interface issues are not a problem. The result is a so-called ferroelectric semiconductor field-effect transistor, built in the same way as transistors currently used on computer chips. The material, alpha indium selenide has ferroelectric properties and a much smaller band gap, making it possible for the material to be a semiconductor without losing ferroelectric properties. The researchers have created a more feasible way to combine transistors and memory on a chip, potentially bringing faster […]
Researchers close in on new nonvolatile memory
Nanowerk December 10, 2019 The emergence of ferroelectricity in nanometer-thick films of doped hafnium oxide (HfO2) makes this material a promising candidate for use in Si-compatible non-volatile memory devices. To make ferroelectric capacitors usable as memory cells, their remnant polarization has to be maximized. An international team of researchers (Germany, Russia, USA – North Carolina State University, University of Nebraska) developed a new methodology to experimentally quantify the polarization-dependent potential profile across a few-nanometer-thick ferroelectric Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 thin films. They found the electric potential profile across the Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 layer to be non-linear and changes with in-situ polarization switching. The non-linear potential […]
Researchers preserve and release trove of public, low-frequency radio data
EurekAlert December 9, 2019 At AGU’s 2019 Fall Meeting researchers unveiled the world’s largest open-access database of ELF/VLF data, Worldwide Archive of Low-frequency Data and Observations (WALDO). Researchers will be able to access nearly 1000 terabytes (TB) of data to further scientific efforts in fields like space weather, ionospheric remote sensing, earthquake forecasting, and subterranean prospecting. This is a joint project of Stanford University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Colorado Denver with support from the National Science Foundation and Department of Defense. Most data are from the last 20 years, some recordings date back to the 1970s […]