Humankind’s next giant step may be onto Mars. But before those missions can begin, scientists need to make scores of breakthrough advances, including learning how to grow crops on the red planet. Practically speaking, astronauts cannot haul an endless supply of topsoil through space. So University of Georgia geologists are figuring out how best to use the materials already on the planet’s surface. To do that, they developed artificial soil mixtures that mimic materials found on Mars. In a new…

A joint research group led by Prof. Jens Eisert of Freie Universität Berlin and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) has shown a way to simulate the quantum physical properties of complex solid state systems. This is done with the help of complex solid state systems that can be studied experimentally. The study was published in the renowned journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). “The real goal is a robust quantum computer that generates…

Using a new method, physicists at the Heidelberg Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics have investigated the ultrafast fragmentation of hydrogen molecules in intense laser fields in detail. They used the rotation of the molecule triggered by a laser pulse as an “internal clock” to measure the timing of the reaction that takes place in a second laser pulse in two steps. Such a “rotational clock” is a general concept applicable to sequential fragmentation processes in other molecules. [Physical Review…

Today around 60% of the world’s population have no access to the Internet. That is why we are intensively looking for solutions to guarantee error-free and smooth data communication with a high bandwidth. Satellite communication networks, the so-called Internet of Space, are ideal for this. With the aim of shifting part of the processing load into the RRAM memory in the sense of an intelligent in-memory computing concept, the joint DFG project starts: “Memristive In-Memory Computing: Radiation hard memory for…

For the first time, the SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) flying observatory has provided direct and unambiguous evidence of water molecules on the moon beyond the permanent shadow at the poles. The infrared observatory, which is owned jointly by the US space agency NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) was able to detect the molecules in the moon’s southern hemisphere using the FORCAST instrument. The research results were published on the 26th of October 2020 in the scientific…

Hitting a specific point on a screen with a laser pointer during a presentation isn’t easy – even the tiniest nervous shaking of the hand becomes one big scrawl at a distance. Now imagine having to do that with several laser pointers at once. That is exactly the problem faced by physicists who try to build quantum computers using individual trapped atoms. They, too, need to aim laser beams – hundreds or even thousands of them in the same apparatus…

Trigger and course of plasma instability explained / agreement with the experiment. Among the loads to which the plasma vessel in a fusion device may be exposed, so-called edge localised modes are particularly undesirable. By computer simulations the origin and the course of this plasma-edge instability could now be explained for the first time in detail. Edge Localised Modes, ELMs for short, are one of the disturbances of the plasma confinement that are caused by the interaction between the charged…

The International Conference on Digital Technologies for Sustainable Crop Production (DigiCrop2020), which is running from November 1-10, 2020 fully online and free of charge, is the new flagship conference of the German Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob – Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production” at the University of Bonn. The topic of the innovative conference could not have been any more pressing: Climate change is impacting crop production and at the same time we need to substantially increase the production…

A crucial resolution barrier in cryo-electron microscopy has been broken. Holger Stark and his team at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry have observed single atoms in a protein structure for the first time and taken the sharpest images ever with this method. Such unprecedented details are essential to understand how proteins perform their work in the living cell or cause diseases. The technique can in future also be used to develop active compounds for new drugs. Since…

The Polish-Israeli team from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw and the Weizmann Institute of Science has made another significant achievement in fluorescent microscopy. In the pages of the Optica journal the team presented a new method of microscopy which, in theory, has no resolution limit. In practice, the team managed to demonstrate a fourfold improvement over the diffraction limit. The continued development of biological sciences and medicine requires the ability to examine smaller and smaller objects….

Sandia developed new device to more efficiently process information. The development of a new method to make non-volatile computer memory may have unlocked a problem that has been holding back machine learning and has the potential to revolutionize technologies like voice recognition, image processing and autonomous driving. A team from Sandia National Laboratories, working with collaborators from the University of Michigan, published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Materials that details a new method that will imbue computer chips…

In situ sequencing enables gene activity inside body tissues to be depicted in microscope images. To facilitate interpretation of the vast quantities of information generated, Uppsala University researchers have now developed an entirely new method of image analysis. Based on algorithms used in artificial intelligence, the method was originally devised to enhance understanding of social networks. The researchers’ study is published in The FEBS Journal. The tissue composing our organs consists of trillions of cells with various functions. All the…

Fraunhofer IDMT has developed a software tool for quality inspectors based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), which automates and simplifies the analysis of industrial sounds, for example in welding processes. Thanks to pre-built AI models, established methods for audio analysis and application-specific sensor data, companies can use it to improve their quality control decisively. Even without AI expert knowledge, statements can be made quickly and reliably regarding the quality of products and manufacturing processes during production and in the final quality…

On the occasion of EclipseCon 2020, Fraunhofer FOKUS launches its simulation environment Eclipse MOSAIC. This solution is based on VSimRTI (Vehicle-2-X Simulation Runtime Infrastructure), which has been developed over the last 12 years in close cooperation with the DCAITI of the TU Berlin and has already been used by more than 600 partners to test mobility services and traffic scenarios. Eclipse MOSAIC is now partially available as open-source. Whether dynamic lane assignment or traffic light phase assistant, new mobility services…

Red dwarfs are the coolest kind of star. As such, they potentially allow liquid water to exist on planets that are quite close to them. In the search for habitable worlds beyond the borders of our solar system, this is a big advantage: the distance between an exoplanet and its star is a crucial factor for its detection. The closer the two are, the higher the chance that astronomers can detect the planet from Earth. “But these stars are rather…

Researchers at uOttawa have created a new method to measure the temporal evolution of electric fields with optical frequencies. The new approach, which works in ambient air, facilitates the direct measurement of the field waveform and could lead to breakthroughs in high-speed electronics. To learn more, we talked to Aleksey Korobenko, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa, and lead author of “Femtosecond streaking in ambient air”, an article recently published in the journal…