Artificial intelligence, hardware innovations boost confocal microscope’s performance. Since artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky patented the principle of confocal microscopy in 1957, it has become the workhorse standard in life science laboratories worldwide, due to its superior contrast over traditional wide-field microscopy. Yet confocal microscopes aren’t perfect. They boost resolution by imaging just one, single, in-focus point at a time, so it can take quite a while to scan an entire, delicate biological sample, exposing it light dosages that can…
New study shows the boundary between time moving forward and backward may blur in quantum mechanics. A team of physicists at the Universities of Bristol, Vienna, the Balearic Islands and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI-Vienna) has shown how quantum systems can simultaneously evolve along two opposite time arrows – both forward and backward in time. The study, published in the latest issue of Communications Physics, necessitates a rethink of how the flow of time is understood…
A jet from a newly formed star flares into the shining depths of reflection nebula NGC 1977 in this Hubble image. The jet (the orange object at the bottom center of the image) is being emitted by the young star Parengo 2042, which is embedded in a disk of debris that could give rise to planets. The star powers a pulsing jet of plasma that stretches over two light-years through space, bending to the north in this image. The gas…
The mechanisms governing the light-sensitive activities of phytochrome, a bacterial protein, have been clarified at atomic scale resolution, opening the door to understanding black rot disease, as well as to regulating other bacterial pathogenicities. Black rot disease in cabbages, radishes and related cruciferous crops may have disastrous consequences for the yield and production of marketable plants. The bacterium Xanthomonas campestris is the major cause of black rot disease, which works by retarding several light-mediated biological processes. Behind this biological retardation…
Fragile orbits of seven exoplanets could survive only limited early bombardment. Seven Earth-sized planets orbit the star TRAPPIST-1 in near-perfect harmony, and U.S. and European researchers have used that harmony to determine how much physical abuse the planets could have withstood in their infancy. “After rocky planets form, things bash into them,” said astrophysicist Sean Raymond of the University of Bordeaux in France. “It’s called bombardment, or late accretion, and we care about it, in part, because these impacts can…
Monsoons are not found only in South Asia, but they are part of a global-scale circulation that affects almost all tropical regions (e.g. Australian monsoon, African monsoon, etc.). One occurs in North America too, the North American monsoon, which affects western Mexico and the southwestern United States, in particular, Arizona and New Mexico. To date, this monsoon was considered similar to other monsoons, although smaller. However, new research published in Nature by two scientists from the University of California, Berkeley…
Trillion percent change of resistance can be achieved in the new material by simply rotating the direction of spin. While electrons are well known to carry both charge and spin, only the electric charge portion is utilized as an information carrier in modern electronic devices. However, the limits of modern electronics and the impending end of Moore’s Law have rekindled the interest in the development of “spintronic” devices, which are capable of harnessing the spin of the electrons. It is…
The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century – decades earlier than records suggest – due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean. An international group of researchers reconstructed the recent history of ocean warming at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean in a region called the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard. Using the chemical signatures found in marine microorganisms, the researchers found that the Arctic Ocean…
Researchers outline in Science how brain research makes new demands on supercomputing. In the latest issue of Science, Katrin Amunts and Thomas Lippert explain how advances in neuroscience demand high-performance computing technology and will ultimately need exascale computing power. “Understanding the brain in all its complexity requires insights from multiple scales – from genomics, cells and synapses to the whole-organ level. This means working with large amounts of data, and supercomputing is becoming an indispensable tool to tackle the brain,”…
The National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory and the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at MSU have solved a nuclear mystery thanks to collaboration between theorists and experimentalists — with an assist from Albert Einstein. A team of researchers, including scientists from the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) and the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU), have solved the case of zirconium-80’s missing mass. To be fair, they also broke the case. Experimentalists showed that zirconium-80 — a…
Researchers in Japan have designed the first bottom-up designed peptides, comprising chains of amino acids, that can form artificial nanopores to identify and enable single molecule-sorting of genetic material in a lipid membrane. Biological nanopores are generally channels made by pore-forming proteins, that can detect specific molecules, but such natural channels are difficult to identify, limiting proposed applications in low-cost, speedy DNA sequencing, small molecule detection and more. “Nanopore sensing is a powerful tool for label-free, single-molecule detection,” said corresponding…
Researchers from Basel and Bochum have succeeded in addressing an apparently unattainable energy transition in an artificial atom using laser light. Making use of the so-called radiative Auger process, they were the first team to specifically excite it. In this process, an electron falls from a higher to a lower energy level and, as a result, emits its energy partly in the form of light and partly by transferring it to another electron. The artificial atoms are narrowly defined areas…
By combining two-dimensional materials, researchers create a macroscopic quantum entangled state emulating rare earth compounds. Physicists have created a new ultra-thin two-layer material with quantum properties that normally require rare earth compounds. This material, which is relatively easy to make and does not contain rare earth metals, could provide a new platform for quantum computing and advance research into unconventional superconductivity and quantum criticality. The researchers showed that by starting from seemingly common materials, a radically new quantum state of…
On-chip frequency shifters in the gigahertz range could be used in next generation quantum computers and networks. The ability to precisely control and change properties of a photon, including polarization, position in space, and arrival time, gave rise to a wide range of communication technologies we use today, including the Internet. The next generation of photonic technologies, such as photonic quantum networks and computers, will require even more control over the properties of a photon. One of the hardest properties…
Crystals that convert light to more useful wavelengths. Solid-solution organic crystals have been brought into the quest for superior photon upconversion materials, which transform presently wasted long-wavelength light into more useful shorter wavelength light. Scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology revisited a materials approach previously deemed lackluster—using a molecule originally developed for organic LEDs—achieving outstanding performance and efficiency. Their findings pave the way for many novel photonic technologies, such as better solar cells and photocatalysts for hydrogen and hydrocarbon productions….
Novel color photography using a high-efficiency probe can super-focus white light into a 6-nanometer spot for nanoscale color imaging. Scientists have developed new materials for next-generation electronics so tiny that they are not only indistinguishable when closely packed, but they also don’t reflect enough light to show fine details, such as colors, with even the most powerful optical microscopes. Under an optical microscope, carbon nanotubes, for example, look grayish. The inability to distinguish fine details and differences between individual pieces…
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