Researchers from Japan design a transducer powered by electrochemical reactions for operating fluid pumps without cumbersome parts in soft robots. The word “robot” would probably conjure up images of hard metallic bodies that are invulnerable to attacks. In modern day-to-day life, however, robots are hardly needed for defending against enemy attacks. Instead, they are required to perform more mundane tasks such as handling delicate objects and interacting with humans. Unfortunately, conventional robots perform poorly at such seemingly simple tasks. Moreover,…
Magnetometers measure the direction, strength or relative changes of magnetic fields, at a specific point in space and time. Employed in many research areas, magnetometers can help doctors to see the brain through medical imaging, or archaeologists to reveal underground treasures without excavating the ground. Some magnetic fields of great interest, for example those produced by the brain, are extraordinarily weak, a billion times weaker than the field of the Earth, and therefore, extremely sensitive magnetometers are required to detect…
A research team from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces reports to have found the key to controlled fabrication of cerium oxide mesocrystals. The research is a step forward in tuning nanomaterials that can serve a wide range of uses —including solar cells, fuel catalysts and even medicine. Mesocrystals are nanoparticles with identical size, shape and crystallographic orientation, and they can be used as building blocks to create artificial nanostructures with customized optical,…
Researchers from the Cavendish Laboratory have modelled a quantum walk of identical particles that can change their fundamental character by simply hopping across a domain wall in a one-dimensional lattice. Their findings, published as a Letter in Physical Review Research, open up a window to engineer and control new kinds of collective motion in the quantum world. All known fundamental particles fall in two groups: either a fermion (“matter particle”) or a boson (“force carrier”), depending on how their state…
Researchers uncover why a complex earthquake in the south Atlantic sent an unexpected tsunami around the world in 2021. Highlights A 47 km-deep, magnitude 7.5 earthquake that struck the south Atlantic in 2021 and caused a global tsunami was actually a sequence of five earthquakes. A shallow, “almost invisible” magnitude 8.2 quake accounted for 70% of the energy released during the event. Global earthquake monitoring needs to improve to understand and mitigate such complex earthquakes and their associated hazards. Scientists…
Smartwatch developed at UCLA measures key stress hormone. Device opens new possibilities for personal health monitoring. The human body responds to stress, from the everyday to the extreme, by producing a hormone called cortisol. To date, it has been impractical to measure cortisol as a way to potentially identify conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress, in which levels of the hormone are elevated. Cortisol levels traditionally have been evaluated through blood samples by professional labs, and while those measurements can…
… nanofoams are key to surviving mass extinctions. Scientists from the Natural History Museum, London (United Kingdom), and the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, Grenoble (France), have found that some pollen has survived mass extinctions thanks, in part, to its nanofoam wall structure. This may explain why the survival of certain plants. It is the first time scientists have described a biological nanofoam structure. Their results are published in Science Advances. Pollen grains protect plant’s genetic material from environmental threats during…
A cloud-based repository that creates a digital fingerprint of engineered microorganisms has been successfully trialled. An international team led by Newcastle University has launched CellRepo, a species and strain database that uses cell barcodes to monitor and track engineered organisms. Reported in a new study in the journal Nature Communications, the database keeps track and organises the digital data produced during cell engineering. It also molecularly links that data to the associated living samples. Available globally, this resource supports international…
International research project confirms possibility for attacks on touchscreens. Usually, an action by the user, such as accidentally clicking on a link, is required to install malware on a smartphone. However, scientists at TU Darmstadt and Zhejiang University have now succeeded in remotely controlling smartphones by imitating touches on the touchscreen. In an international research project, scientists at the System Security Lab of TU Darmstadt and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou managed, for the first time, to perform targeted attacks on…
European joint experiment prepares transition to large-scale ITER project. European scientists have achieved a major success on the road to energy production through fusion plasmas: They produced stable plasmas with 59 megajoules of energy output at the world’s largest fusion facility, JET, in Culham near Oxford, UK. The team, which also includes researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), used the fuel of future fusion power plants. These were the first experiments of their kind in the…
The Congo Basin is the second largest contiguous tropical forest area on earth. Even though it is so vast and plays such a major role in the global climate system, there is no empirical data on the forest’s gas exchange with the atmosphere. Especially with regard to the greenhouse gases nitrous oxide and methane, research is still in the dark. Other tropical forests are known to be a major source of nitrous oxide and a sink for methane. But because…
Photogrammetry and skeleton extraction as design tools for living architecture. More urban green helps to cool down cities. Baubotanik (bau = construction + botanik = botany) is a construction method that incorporates living trees into architectural structures. Specialists in this field at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) envision the use of trees to enhance the functions of the built environment. They use trees for structural purposes as supports for pavilions or balconies or in green facades to benefit the…
Whether for use in cybersecurity, gaming or scientific simulation, the world needs true random numbers, but generating them is harder than one might think. But a group of Brown University physicists has developed a technique that can potentially generate millions of random digits per second by harnessing the behavior of skyrmions — tiny magnetic anomalies that arise in certain two-dimensional materials. Their research, published in Nature Communications, reveals previously unexplored dynamics of single skyrmions, the researchers say. Discovered around a…
Around ten thousand tons of silicon in discarded photovoltaic modules end up on the recycling market annually in Germany. This figure will rise to several hundred thousand tons per year by 2029. Currently, the aluminum, glass and copper of the discarded modules are reprocessed, however, the silicon solar cells are not. In order to be able to reuse the silicon, researchers from the Fraunhofer Center for Silicon Photovoltaics CSP and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE together with…
From 2023, rail vehicle manufacturers will be able to have their braking systems tested and certified on the TU Graz campus. In addition, the new test rig will allow for the first time investigations of brake loads and their effects on the complete chassis. “With this test rig, we are opening up a new area of research and entering uncharted territory,” says a delighted Martin Leitner. The term “uncharted territory” was deliberately chosen by the head of the Institute of…
Due to climate change, Arctic winters are getting warmer. An international study by UZH researchers shows that Arctic warming causes temperature anomalies and cold damage thousands of kilometers away in East Asia. This in turn leads to reduced vegetation growth, later blossoming, smaller harvests and reduced CO2 absorption by the forests in the region. Switzerland has had relatively little snow so far this winter, but last year was different: Trains and trams stopped running, and tree branches broke under the…
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