This latest image of Jupiter, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020, was captured when the planet was 653 million kilometres from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the Great Red Spot changing colour — again. The new image also features Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. A unique and exciting detail of Hubble’s new snapshot appears…
The stem cells tasked with creating and maintaining biological tissues have a difficult job. They have to precisely divide to form new specialized cells, which are destined to different fates even though they contain identical DNA. An obvious question then is: How do the cells divide in all the right ways to produce a healthy tissue? This was the grand motivating question for Andrew Muroyama, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Stanford University biologist Dominique Bergmann, as he monitored…
Path to higher thermal insulation of the plasma / Reduction of plasma turbulence The turbulence code GENE (Gyrokinetic Electromagnetic Numerical Experiment), developed at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) at Garching, Germany, has proven to be very useful for the theoretical description of turbulence in the plasma of tokamak-type fusion devices. Extended for the more complex geometry of stellarator-type devices, computer simulations with GENE now indicate a new method to reduce plasma turbulence in stellarator plasmas. This could significantly…
Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and King’s College London cleared the obstacle that had prevented the creation of electrically driven nanolasers for integrated circuits. The approach, reported in a recent paper in Nanophotonics, enables coherent light source design on the scale not only hundreds of times smaller than the thickness of a human hair but even smaller than the wavelength of light emitted by the laser. This lays the foundation for ultrafast optical data transfer in…
3D printing has driven innovations in fields ranging from art to aerospace to medicine. However, the high-energy ultraviolet (UV) light used in most 3D printers to cure liquid resins into solid objects limits the technique’s applications. Visible-light curing, which would be more appropriate for some uses, such as tissue engineering and soft robotics, is slow. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed photopolymer resins that boost the speed of visible-light curing. With the help of computer-aided design, 3D-printed…
Automatic approach could enable precision fabrication of optical components and multimaterial structures. Researchers have developed an automated 3D printing method that can produce multicolor 3D microstructures using different materials. The new method could be used to make a variety of optical components including optical sensors and light-driven actuators as well as multimaterial structures for applications such as soft robotics and medical applications. “Combining multiple kinds of materials can be used to create a function that cannot be realized with a…
A scientific first This work, published in Cell and led by the UNC-Chapel Hill lab of Bryan L. Roth, MD, PhD, sets the stage for the discovery of new kinds of antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, and treatments for substance use disorders. Psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline cause severe and often long-lasting hallucinations, but they show great potential in treating serious psychiatric conditions, such as major depressive disorder. To fully investigate this potential, scientists need to know how these…
Mapping the atomic motion during a molecular vibration. One of the long-standing goals of research on the light-induced dynamics of molecules is to observe time-dependent changes in the structure of molecules, which result from the absorption of light, as directly and unambiguously as possible. To this end, researchers have developed and applied a plethora of approaches. Of particular promise among these approaches are several methods developed in the last years that rely on diffraction (of light or electrons) as means…
An international effort that brought together more than 60 ice, ocean and atmosphere scientists from three dozen international institutions has generated new estimates of how much of an impact Earth’s melting ice sheets could have on global sea levels by 2100. If greenhouse gas emissions continue apace, Greenland and Antarctica’s ice sheets could together contribute more than 15 inches (38 centimeters) of global sea level rise – and that’s beyond the amount that has already been set in motion by…
Rubbery electronics offer promise for new applications A medical robotic hand could allow doctors to more accurately diagnose and treat people from halfway around the world, but currently available technologies aren’t good enough to match the in-person experience. Researchers report in Science Advances that they have designed and produced a smart electronic skin and a medical robotic hand capable of assessing vital diagnostic data by using a newly invented rubbery semiconductor with high carrier mobility. Cunjiang Yu, Bill D. Cook…
Landshut University of Applied Sciences project develops device that transmits the medical devices’ acoustic alarm signals directly to the rescue services’ headsets When injured people have to be rescued by rescue helicopter after an accident, every second is precious. One problem for rescue teams during such missions though is that they cannot immediately hear the medical devices’ alarm signals due to the high noise level in the helicopter and are therefore often only able to react with a time delay….
“Honey, I shrunk the detector”: Researchers have developed the world’s smallest ultrasound detector Researchers at Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed the world’s smallest ultrasound detector. It is based on miniaturized photonic circuits on top of a silicon chip. With a size 100 times smaller than an average human hair, the new detector can visualize features that are much smaller than previously possible, leading to what is known as super-resolution imaging. Researchers at Helmholtz…
How is conceptual knowledge represented in the brain such that we can flexibly use it to interpret unfamiliar information or to infer relations we’ve never directly experienced? One means of organizing conceptual knowledge would be in a kind of internal map. Thus, the map would have to be dynamically defined along those feature dimensions that are currently relevant to the concept. Stephanie Theves and Christian Doeller of MPI CBS in Leipzig together with Guillén Fernández of the Donders Institute Nijmegen,…
When the sun rises, a complex dance begins in perovskite solar cells – a type of solar cell that can supplement or replace existing silicon solar cells in the future: Electrons are supplied with energy by light and move. Where electrons move, they leave holes. At the same time, ions move around in the perovskite material. An understanding of this complex dance – i.e. how exactly these particles move – can help to increase the efficiency of solar cells. Gert-Jan…
The ALICE experiment at the particle accelerator CERN in Geneva has the aim of providing new insights into an extremely hot and dense state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma. The entire matter of the universe was in this state just a few millionths of a second after the big bang, and the ALICE experiment will help researchers discover how the universe developed out of this primordial soup. An international team of scientists led by the physicist Harald Appelshäuser from Goethe…
Although Earth is uniquely situated in the solar system to support creatures that call it home, different forms of life could have once existed, or might still exist, on other planets. But finding traces of past or current lifeforms on other worlds is challenging. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Analytical Chemistry have developed a fully automated microchip electrophoresis analyzer that, when incorporated into a planetary rover, could someday detect organic biosignatures in extraterrestrial soil. One critical piece of evidence for…
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