01. New property of light discovered 02. Experiment reverses the direction of heat flow 03. How to bend waves to arrive at the right place 04. A new ‘golden’ age for electronics? 05. Researchers teleport information within a diamond 06. Sensors and metrology as the driving force for digitalization 07. 3D Printing of Hypersonic Missile Swarms 08. Scientists chart course toward a new world of synthetic biology 09. Physicists develop new method to prove quantum entanglement 10. Graphene and nanotube mesh filters salt from water And others… 2.8 Trillion Tons of Nearly Fresh Water Found Under the Ocean A European […]
2.8 Trillion Tons of Nearly Fresh Water Found Under the Ocean
Next Big Future June 23, 2019 According to a team of researchers in the US (Columbia University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) their data suggests continuous aquifers extending 90 km offshore New Jersey and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, on the U.S. Atlantic margin using new shallow water electromagnetic geophysical methods. The continuous submarine aquifer system spans at least 350 km of the U.S. Atlantic coast and contains about 2800 km3 (2.8 trillion tons) of low-salinity groundwater. The findings can be used to improve models of past glacial, eustatic, tectonic, and geomorphic processes on continental shelves and provide insight into shelf geochemistry, biogeochemical cycles, and the […]
3D Printing of Hypersonic Missile Swarms
Next Big Future June 19, 2019 The vision is to make swarms of up to 30 hypersonic scramjets the size of cruise missiles, launched from air, land and sea. The missiles will share data with each other, correcting their flights, perhaps changing targets midcourse. And they can be manufactured relatively quickly and for much less cost than most of the hypersonic vehicles that have been built so far. 3D Printing will make construction faster and significantly less expensive to manufacture. The weapon has completed ground testing and will fly soon…read more.
A European mission will intercept an unknown comet for the first time
MIT Technology Review June 20, 2019 On June 19, the European Space Agency announced plans to launch a fleet of three small spacecraft in 2028 and loiter a million miles away until an interesting and accessible comet is found. The Interceptor will tag along with Ariel, a larger observatory designed to study the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars. Two of the spacecraft will pass close to the comet’s nucleus where they hope to gather enough data to understand the structure of both the nucleus and the comet’s tail. The third spacecraft will act as a backup and data relay…read […]
Experiment reverses the direction of heat flow
Science Daily June 27, 2019 An international team of researchers (Brazil, Germany, Singapore) has experimentally demonstrated the reversal of heat flow for two quantum correlated spins-1/2, initially prepared in local thermal states at different effective temperatures, employing a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance setup. They observed a spontaneous energy flow from the cold to the hot system. This process is enabled by a tradeoff between correlations and entropy that they quantified with information-theoretical quantities. These results highlight the subtle interplay of quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and information theory. They further provide a mechanism to control heat on the microscale…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Graphene and nanotube mesh filters salt from water
Physics World June 24, 2019 Porous graphene sheets have excellent filtration capabilities and can block most ions, but their fragility limits their scale-up beyond laboratory demonstrations. An international team of researchers (China, USA – UCLA) has developed a way to create centimetre-sized sheets of porous graphene that do not suffer from the effects of defects. This was done by depositing a mesh-like network of single-walled carbon nanotubes on top of a graphene sheet, which essentially reinforces the material and blocks the spread of cracks and tears. Then the pores are etched in the material to create a desalination membrane. When […]
How to bend waves to arrive at the right place
Science Daily June 24, 2019 Electronic matter waves traveling through the weak and smoothly varying disorder potential of a semiconductor show a characteristic branching behavior instead of a smooth spreading of flow. By transferring this phenomenon to optics, researchers at Harvard University demonstrated numerically, how the branched flow of light can be controlled to propagate along a single branch rather than along many of them at the same time. The method is based on shaping the incoming wavefront and only requires partial knowledge of the system’s transmission matrix. They show that the light flowing along a single branch has a […]
More energy needed to cope with climate change
Science Daily June 24, 2019 Future energy demand is likely to increase due to climate change, but the magnitude depends on many interacting sources of uncertainty. An international team of researchers (Austria, USA – NCAR, Boston University, Italy) shows that, across 210 realizations of socioeconomic and climate scenarios, vigorous (moderate) warming increases global climate-exposed energy demand before adaptation around 2050 by 25–58% (11–27%), on top of a factor 1.7–2.8 increase above present-day due to socioeconomic developments and that energy demand rises by more than 25% in the tropics and southern regions of the USA, Europe and China. An important way […]
A new ‘golden’ age for electronics?
Science Daily June 25, 2019 One way that heat damages electronic equipment is by making components expand at different rates, resulting in forces that cause micro-cracking and distortion. The valence fluctuations of Sm in samarium monosulfide (SmS) are known to induce possible large isotropic negative thermal expansion (NTE). Researchers in Japan prepared Ce-doped and Nd-doped SmS polycrystalline samples using a simpler method with much lower reaction temperature than the existing method. Typically, Sm0.80Ce0.20S exhibits giant NTE with total volume change of 2.6% in the wide temperature range from 330 K to 100 K, the lowest covered here. This research opens a new […]
New property of light discovered
Phys.org June 28, 2019 An international team of researchers (Spain, USA – University of Colorado) has discovered a new property of light—self-torque. Their experiments involved firing two lasers at a cloud of argon gas—doing so forced the beams to overlap, and they joined and were emitted as a single beam from the other side of the argon cloud. The result was a type of vortex beam. Then they changed the the orbitatl momentum so that the lasers had different orbital angular momentum and they were slightly out of sync. This resulted in a beam that looked like a corkscrew with […]