Global Biodefense October 5, 2020 Researchers in Australia regard malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS as the “big three” infectious diseases. Together they are responsible for about 2.7 million deaths a year around the world. Although anti-malarial drugs are routinely used to treat and prevent malaria infection, the emergence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis is a major cause of death and a serious public health concern. Since the discovery of HIV in the 1980s, the disease has caused 33 million deaths. Some 38 million people have HIV/AIDS worldwide. There is currently no cure or protective vaccine. The current pandemic highlights the need for […]
Tag Archives: S&T -Australia
The world’s first photodetector that can see all shades of light
Nanowerk September 22, 2020 Atomically thin materials face an ongoing challenge of scalability, hampering practical deployment despite their fascinating properties. Although tin monosulfide (SnS) displays properties of superior carrier mobility and large absorption coefficient at atomic thicknesses, the lack of successful synthesis techniques to prepare large‐area and stoichiometric atomically thin SnS layers has prevented exploration of these properties for versatile applications. Researchers in Australia printed SnS layers with thicknesses varying from a single unit cell (0.8 nm) to multiple stacked unit cells (≈1.8 nm) synthesized from metallic liquid tin, with lateral dimensions on the millimeter scale. They exhibit a broadband […]
Beating noise via superposition of order
Phys.org August 25, 2020 Classically no information can be transmitted through a completely noisy channel. But with quantum mechanics, adding a second channel actually provides a way to successfully get the information through. Researchers in Australia have shown that by combining the noisy channels such that you don’t know which noisy channel was applied first, it becomes possible to transmit some information. They considered two limiting cases – when both channels are fully depolarising, the ideal limit is communication of 0.049 bits;, when one channel is fully depolarising the ideal limit is communication of 1 bit. Their results offer intriguing […]
Glass blowing inspires new class of quantum sensors
Nanowerk August 12, 2020 By embedding micron-scale diamond particles at an annular interface within the cross section of a silicate glass fiber, researchers in Australia demonstrated a robust fiber material capable of sensing magnetic fields. NV centers in the diamond microcrystals are well preserved throughout the fiber drawing process. The hybrid fiber presents a low propagation loss of ∼4.0 dB/m in the NV emission spectral window, permitting remote monitoring of the optically detected magnetic resonance signals. They demonstrated NV-spin magnetic resonance readout through 50 cm of fiber. The study paves a way for the scalable fabrication of fiber-based diamond sensors […]
Novel approach improves graphene-based supercapacitors
EurekAlert August 3, 2020 Researchers in Australia have developed a technique to improve the performance of quasi‐solid‐state supercapacitors made by graphitized silicon carbide on silicon electrodes and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)+H2SO4 gel electrolyte. They increased the specific capacitance of the cell up to 3‐fold resulting from a simple agent‐free, in situ, electrochemical treatment leading to functionalization of the graphitic electrodes. The functionalization of the electrodes simultaneously enables redox reactions, without adding any redox agent, and increases the overall capacitance…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
New organic material unlocks faster and more flexible electronic devices
Science Daily July 15, 2020 Long-range and fast transport of coherent excitons is important for the development of high-speed excitonic circuits and quantum computing applications. By precisely stacking carbon and hydrogen molecules one over the other researchers in Australia have designed an organic semiconductor. The material is just one carbon atom thick which gives it the flexibility to be bent into any shape. The material is biodegradable or easily recyclable, thus avoiding the tonnes of e-waste generated by current generation electronic devices…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Call for immunology to return to the wild
EurekAlert July 2, 2020 The viruses that cause COVID-19, AIDS, Ebola, and rabies – among others – all made the lethal jump from wildlife into humans. At the Australian Wild and Comparative Immunology (WACI) https://www.wacimmuno.com/ workshop researchers in Australia outline how integrating a more diverse set of species and environments could enhance the biomedical research cycle. The viruses that cause COVID-19, AIDS, Ebola, and rabies – among others – all made the lethal jump from wildlife into humans. Understanding how the immune system works in animals that live with coronaviruses in a natural environment, such as bats, can give us […]
Shining light into the dark: New discovery makes microscopic imaging possible in dark conditions
Phys.org July 9, 2020 Chemiluminescence and fluorescence have revolutionized the study of chemical and biological processes. Technically simple solution of converting chemical energy into light energy only at specific sites defined by a clean, easy-to-deliver focused light stimulus is not yet a viable option. Researchers in Australia have developed a method where the light shines on an opaque substrate, while the other side of the sample in contact with the specimen does not have any exposure to the external light at all. The brief light exposure activates the chemicals and makes the sample glow in the dark. The technique addresses […]
Novel error-correction scheme developed for quantum computers
Science Daily March 11, 2020 Bosonic rotation codes are based on phase-space rotation symmetry. Researchers in Australia present a universal quantum computing scheme applicable to a subset of this class which includes the well-known cat and binomial codes, among many others. The entangling gate in the scheme code can be used to interface different rotation-symmetric encodings. They propose a teleportation-based error-correction scheme that allows recoveries to be tracked entirely in software. Numerically have shown that the error-correction scheme is close to optimal for error-free ancillae and ideal measurements and present a scheme for fault-tolerant, universal quantum computing based on the […]
Nano-thin flexible touchscreens could be printed like newspaper
Nanowerk January 24, 2020 Researchers in Australia used a thin film common in cell phone touchscreens and shrunk it from 3D to 2D, using liquid metal chemistry. They synthesized flexible two-dimensional indium tin oxide (ITO) using a low-temperature liquid metal printing technique. The approach can directly deposit monolayer or bilayer ITO onto desired substrates, with the resulting bilayer samples offering a transparency above 99.3% and a sheet with low resistance. To illustrate the capabilities of the technique, they developed a capacitive touch screen using centimetre-sized monolayer ITO sheets…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE