Physics connects seismic data to properties of rocks and sediments. A new analysis of seismic data from NASA’s Mars InSight mission has revealed a couple of surprises. The first surprise: the top 300 meters of the subsurface beneath the landing site near the Martian equator contains little or no ice. “We find that Mars’ crust is weak and porous. The sediments are not well-cemented. And there’s no ice or not much ice filling the pore spaces,” said geophysicist Vashan Wright…
Flexible waterproof sensors can control smart devices, such as lamps, music players. Wearable human-machine interface devices, HMIs, can be used to control machines, computers, music players, and other systems. A challenge for conventional HMIs is the presence of sweat on human skin. In Applied Physics Reviews, by AIP Publishing, scientists at UCLA describe their development of a type of HMI that is stretchable, inexpensive, and waterproof. The device is based on a soft magnetoelastic sensor array that converts mechanical pressure…
Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)— in which the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a partner— to study planet formation have made the first-ever detection of gas in a circumplanetary disk. What’s more, the detection also suggests the presence of a very young exoplanet. The results of the research are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Circumplanetary disks are an amassing of gas, dust, and debris around young planets. These disks give rise to moons and other…
Space may look empty, but it contains extreme temperatures, high levels of background radiation, micrometeoroids, and the unfiltered glare of the Sun. In addition, materials and equipment on the outside of the International Space Station are exposed to atomic oxygen (AO) and other charged particles as it orbits the Earth at the very edge of our atmosphere. Only the hardiest materials, equipment, and organisms can withstand this harsh environment, and scientists conducting research on the orbiting laboratory have identified some of them…
Electrical control of exchange-bias effect. A RMIT-led international collaboration published this week has observed, for the first time, electric gate-controlled exchange-bias effect in van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures, offering a promising platform for future energy-efficient, beyond-CMOS electronics. The exchange-bias (EB) effect, which originates from interlayer magnetic coupling, has played a significant role in fundamental magnetics and spintronics since its discovery. Although manipulating the EB effect by an electronic gate has been a significant goal in spintronics, until now, only very…
Tiny crystals, known as quantum dots, have enabled an international team to achieve a quantum efficiency exceeding 100 percent in the photocurrent generated in a hybrid inorganic-organic semiconductor. Perovskites are exciting semiconductors for light-harvesting applications and have already shown some impressive performances in solar cells. But improvements in photo-conversion efficiency are necessary to take this technology to a broader market. Light comes in packets of energy known as photons. When a semiconductor absorbs a photon, the electromagnetic energy is transferred…
Neural networks determine the amplitude and phase of X-ray pulses, enabling new, high-resolution quantum studies. The Science Ultrafast pulses from X-ray lasers reveal how atoms move at timescales of a femtosecond. That’s a quadrillionth of a second. However, measuring the properties of the pulses themselves is challenging. While determining a pulse’s maximum strength, or ‘amplitude,’ is straightforward, the time at which the pulse reaches the maximum, or ‘phase,’ is often hidden. A new study trains neural networks to analyze the…
Using light, atoms can be made to attract each other. A team from Vienna and Innsbruck was able to measure this binding state of light and matter for the first time. A very special bonding state between atoms has been created in the laboratory for the first time: With a laser beam, atoms can be polarised so that they are positively charged on one side and negatively charged on the other. This makes them attract each other creating a very…
Flash is one of the most energetic short-duration gamma-ray bursts ever observed. For the first time, scientists have recorded millimeter-wavelength light from a fiery explosion caused by the merger of a neutron star with another star. Led by Northwestern University and Radboud University in the Netherlands, the team also confirmed this flash as one of the most energetic short-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) ever observed, leaving behind one of the most luminous afterglows on record. Astrophysicists made the discovery with the…
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has peered into the chaos of the Cartwheel Galaxy, revealing new details about star formation and the galaxy’s central black hole. Webb’s powerful infrared gaze produced this detailed image of the Cartwheel and two smaller companion galaxies against a backdrop of many other galaxies. This image provides a new view of how the Cartwheel Galaxy has changed over billions of years. The Cartwheel Galaxy, located about 500 million light-years away in the Sculptor constellation, is…
A super-Earth planet has been found near the habitable zone of a red dwarf star only 37 light-years from the Earth. This is the first discovery by a new instrument on the Subaru Telescope and offers a chance to investigate the possibility of life on planets around nearby stars. With such a successful first result, we can expect that the Subaru Telescope will discover more, potentially even better, candidates for habitable planets around red dwarfs. Red dwarfs, stars smaller than…
– further back in time than ever before. A collaboration led by scientists at Nagoya University in Japan has investigated the nature of dark matter surrounding galaxies seen as they were 12 billion years ago, billions of years further back in time than ever before. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, offer the tantalizing possibility that the fundamental rules of cosmology may differ when examining the early history of our universe. Seeing something that happened such a long time…
Waves of magnetic excitation sweep through this exciting new material whether it’s in superconducting mode or not – another possible clue to how unconventional superconductors carry electric current with no loss. Electrons find each other repulsive. Nothing personal – it’s just that their negative charges repel each other. So getting them to pair up and travel together, like they do in superconducting materials, requires a little nudge. In old-school superconductors, which were discovered in 1911 and conduct electric current with…
A newly developed polarizer-embedded metalens enables a compact, portable microscope system that efficiently obtains wide-field, noise-free, high-resolution images. The microscope effectively expands human eyesight to microworld. It supports wide applications in scientific research, biomedical diagnosis, industry, and beyond. The ultimate goal is superresolution, yet along the way researchers are working to achieve compact, miniature devices with comprehensive performance for wide field-of-view (FOV), large depth-of-field (DOF), and high throughput. Traditional optical microscopes are based on refractive optical elements, which are usually…
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutron scattering to determine whether a specific material’s atomic structure could host a novel state of matter called a spiral spin liquid. By tracking tiny magnetic moments known as “spins” on the honeycomb lattice of a layered iron trichloride magnet, the team found the first 2D system to host a spiral spin liquid. The discovery provides a test bed for future studies of physics phenomena that may drive next-generation information…
Space study offers clearest understanding yet of the life cycle of supermassive black holes. Research uses X-ray telescopes and a new data analysis technique to describe space objects. Black holes with varying light signatures but that were thought to be the same objects being viewed from different angles are actually in different stages of the life cycle, according to a study led by Dartmouth researchers. The research on black holes known as “active galactic nuclei,” or AGNs, says that it…
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