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 […]
Tag Archives: S&T -Australia
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
Cutting through fog with laser focus
Phys.org January 7, 2020 Most of the previous studies demonstrated spatial focusing to the speckle grain size, and manipulation of the temporal properties of the achieved focus. Researchers in Australia demonstrate an approach to control the total temporal impulse response, not only at a single speckle grain but overall spatial degrees of freedom (spatial and polarization modes) at any arbitrary delay time through a multimode fiber. Global enhancement or suppression of the total light intensity exiting a multimode fibre is shown for arbitrary delays and polarization states. This work could benefit to applications that require pulse delivery in disordered media, […]
Mind the gap – new wide-bandgap topological insulator
Nanowerk December 17, 2019 To construct electronic devices with low-energy consumption the low-dissipation surface states of topological insulators (TIs) are widely employed. But practical applications of TIs have been severely limited by the small electronic bandgaps in most known materials. To achieve stability researchers in Australia used a scheme based on co-substitution of sulphur balanced by a small amount of larger vanadium and tin ions resulting the complex material Vx:Bi1.08-xSn0.02Sb0.9Te2S. They demonstrated that the surface dominant transport behavior can survive above 50 K. The robust surface states in V doped single crystal systems provide an ideal platform to study the Dirac […]
New tool to predict the global spread of dengue
Science Daily December 4, 2019 According to the World Health Organisation, around half the world’s population is at risk of contracting dengue. International travelers significantly contribute to dengue’s rapid and large-scale spread by importing the disease from endemic into non-endemic countries. Researchers in Australia consider international air travel volumes to construct weighted networks, representing passenger flows between airports. They calculate the probability of passengers being infected with dengue which depends on the destination, duration and timing of travel. The findings shed light onto dengue importation routes and reveal country-specific reporting rates that have been until now largely unknown. The research […]
New spin directions in pyrite an encouraging sign for future spintronics
Science Daily November 12, 2019 Generating and manipulating out-of-plane spins without applying an external electric or magnetic field has been a key challenge in spintronics. Researchers in Australia demonstrate for the first time that pyrite-type (Pyrite is an iron-sulfide mineral that displays multiple internal planes of electronic symmetry) crystals can host unconventional energy- and direction-dependent spin textures on the surface, with both in-plane and out-of-plane spin components, in sharp contrast to spin textures in conventional topological materials. The findings provide a platform for experimentalists to detect and exploit unconventional surface spin textures in future spin-based nanoelectronic devices…read more. Open Access […]
Experimental observation of a new class of materials: Excitonic insulators
Science Daily July 31, 2019 In a new study researchers in Australia have found evidence of a new phase of matter predicted in the 1960s: the excitonic insulator. It is a new phase of matter in the critical transition point between insulator and metal. The researchers studied antimony nanoflake using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. They observed the unique feature of the excitonic insulator, a charge density wave (CDW) without periodic lattice distortion and a gap induced by the CDW near the Fermi surface, suggesting that the antimony (Sb(110)) nanoflake is an excitonic insulator. They are predicted to host many […]
Autonomous drones that can ‘see’ and fly intelligently
Phys.org February 6, 2019 Researchers in Australia used an Xbox Kinect sensor as an input camera to help drones ‘see’ their environment. They developed algorithms to process the video footage image by image, to help the drones know their own speed, motion, and to detect obstacles so they can reach their target position. The algorithm uses the images the drone ‘sees’ and compares the same pixel to detect the differences in 2-D images and calculates the speed and location of drones in 3-D space. As the RGB-D cameras are still in their infancy, they suffer from performance drawbacks such as […]