Glass, despite its apparent transparency and rigidity, is a complex and intriguing material. When a liquid is cooled to form a glass, its dynamics slows down significantly, resulting in its unique properties. This process, known as “glass transition”, has puzzled scientists for decades. But one of its intriguing aspects is the emergence of “dynamical heterogeneities,” where the dynamics become increasingly correlated and intermittent as the liquid cools down and approaches the glass transition temperature. In a new study, researchers propose…

Ultra-low radiation cables reduce background noise for neutrino and dark matter detectors. Imagine trying to tune a radio to a single station but instead encountering static noise and interfering signals from your own equipment. That is the challenge facing research teams searching for evidence of extremely rare events that could help understand the origin and nature of matter in the universe. It turns out that when you are trying to tune into some of the universe’s weakest signals, it helps…

Visualizing electron flow motivates new devices inspired by airplane wings. A study showing how electrons flow around sharp bends, such as those found in integrated circuits, has the potential to improve how these circuits, commonly used in electronic and optoelectronic devices, are designed. It has been known theoretically for about 80 years that when electrons travel around bends, they tend to heat up because their flow lines get squished locally. Until now, however, no one had measured the heat, for…

A new generation of cloud services is on the rise. It is based on the paradigm of “serverless computing”, which is an active research topic at the Institute for Computer Science in Würzburg. In cloud computing, commercial providers make computing resources available on demand to their customers over the Internet. This service is partly offered “serverless”, that is, without servers. How can that work? Computing resources without a server, isn’t that like a restaurant without a kitchen? “The term is…

The physical laws of everyday water flow were established two centuries ago. However, scientists today struggle to simulate disrupted water flow virtually, e.g., when a hand or object alters its flow. Now, a research team from Tohoku University has harnessed the power of deep reinforcement learning to replicate the flow of water when disturbed. Replicating this agitated liquid motion, as it is known, allowed them to recreate water flow in real time based on only a small amount of data…

New finding might explain why quasars flare and fade so quickly. A new Northwestern University-led study is changing the way astrophysicists understand the eating habits of supermassive black holes. While previous researchers have hypothesized that black holes eat slowly, new simulations indicate that black holes scarf food much faster than conventional understanding suggests. The study will be published on Wednesday (Sept. 20) in The Astrophysical Journal. According to new high-resolution 3D simulations, spinning black holes twist up the surrounding space-time,…

3D printing can produce highly complex shapes. But printing ceramic objects with the help of a laser is a more difficult challenge. Now researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have for the first time taken tomograms revealing what happens at microscopic level during this fabrication process. The findings will help improve this very promising technology. 3D printing is already being used to produce many objects. Additive manufacturing is increasingly being used in the aerospace and automotive industry, for example,…

Microcombs can help us discover planets outside our solar system and track new diseases in our bodies. But current microcombs are inefficient and unable to reach their full potential. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have scored a world first with their solution to make microcombs ten times more efficient. Their breakthrough opens the way to new discoveries in space and healthcare and paves the way for high-performance lasers in a range of other technologies. Laser frequency…

The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT, President Kim Byung-Suk) has developed a ‘Road Pothole Filtering Program’ to establish an emergency road restoration system for frequent pothole occurrences. Commonly referred to as ‘the landmine of the road,’ potholes are a road damage phenomenon in which parts of the asphalt sink into bowl-like depressions. Potholes occur when a significant amount of rainwater infiltrates the road surface, weakening the ground below and causing the asphalt pavement to collapse under the…

Moon’s permanently shadowed regions are younger than previously estimated. A team including Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Raluca Rufu recently calculated that most of the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are at most around 3.4 billion years old and can contain relatively young deposits of water ice. Water resources are considered key for sustainable exploration of the Moon and beyond, but these findings suggest that current estimates for cold-trapped ices are too high. The current tilt of the Moon’s spin axis…

LCLS-II ushers in a new era of science. With up to a million X-ray flashes per second, 8,000 times more than its predecessor, it transforms the ability of scientists to explore atomic-scale, ultrafast phenomena that are key to a broad range of applications, from quantum materials to clean energy technologies and medicine. The newly upgraded Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory successfully produced its first X-rays, and researchers…

… deepens mystery of Hubble constant tension. The rate at which the universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant, is one of the fundamental parameters for understanding the evolution and ultimate fate of the cosmos. However, a persistent difference called the “Hubble Tension” is seen between the value of the constant measured with a wide range of independent distance indicators and its value predicted from the big bang afterglow. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provides new capabilities to scrutinize…

New research shows that the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy can have a direct impact on the chemical distribution of the host galaxy. This provides another piece of the puzzle for understanding how galaxies evolve. It is well known that active supermassive black holes can produce major changes their host galaxies by heating up and removing the interstellar gas in the galaxy. But the compact sizes of black holes, the long distances from Earth, and obscuration…

Innovative technique achieves unprecedented data transfer rates with on-chip optical communication. The past few years have seen a massive surge in the amount of data transferred and processed per second. Rapidly emerging technologies, such as high-dimensional quantum communications, large-scale neural networks, and high-capacity networks, require large bandwidths and high data transfer speeds. One plausible way to achieve them is by replacing the conventional metallic wires between the components in an electronic system with optical interconnects, i.e., using light instead of…

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers from the Paul-Drude-Institut in Berlin, Germany, and the Instituto Balseiro in Bariloche, Argentina, demonstrated that the mixing of confined quantum fluids of light and GHz sound leads to the emergence of an elusive phonoriton quasi-particle – in part a quantum of light (photon), a quantum of sound (phonon) and a semiconductor exciton. This discovery opens a novel way to coherently convert information between optical and microwave domains, bringing potential benefits to…

A team of researchers, led by a University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa planetary scientist, discovered that high energy electrons in Earth’s plasma sheet are contributing to weathering processes on the Moon’s surface and, importantly, the electrons may have aided the formation of water on the lunar surface. The study was published today in Nature Astronomy. Understanding the concentrations and distributions of water on the Moon is critical to understanding its formation and evolution, and to providing water resources for…