A promising lead halide perovskite is great at converting sunlight to electricity, but it breaks down at room temperature; now scientists have discovered how to stabilize it with pressure from a diamond anvil cell. Among the materials known as perovskites, one of the most exciting is a material that can convert sunlight to electricity as efficiently as today’s commercial silicon solar cells and has the potential for being much cheaper and easier to manufacture. There’s just one problem: Of the…

Study describes passive cooling system that aims to help impoverished communities, reduce cooling and heating costs, lower CO2 emissions. Passive cooling, like the shade a tree provides, has been around forever. Recently, researchers have been exploring how to turbo charge a passive cooling technique — known as radiative or sky cooling — with sun-blocking, nanomaterials that emit heat away from building rooftops. While progress has been made, this eco-friendly technology isn’t commonplace because researchers have struggled to maximize the materials’…

Using observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a trio of hot worlds larger than Earth orbiting a much younger version of our Sun called TOI 451. The system resides in the recently discovered Pisces-Eridanus stream, a collection of stars less than 3% the age of our solar system that stretches across one-third of the sky. The planets were discovered in TESS images taken between October and December 2018. Follow-up studies of…

Over the past years, global data traffic has experienced a boom, with over 12.5 billion connected devices all over the world. The current world-wide deployment of the 5G telecommunications standard is triggering the need for smaller devices with enhanced performances, such as higher speed, lower power consumption and reduced cost as well as easier manufacturability. In search for the appropriate technology, photonic devices emerged as the leading technology for the evolution of such information and communication technologies, already surpassing the…

A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg has coherently controlled nuclear excitations using suitably shaped X-ray light for the first time. In the experiment performed at the European Synchrotron ESRF, they achieved a temporal control stability of a few zeptoseconds. This forms the basis for new experimental approaches exploiting the control of nuclear dynamics which could lead to more precise future time standards and open new possibilities on the way to nuclear batteries….

Deep learning algorithms reveal rules of gene regulation With the help of artificial intelligence (AI) a German-American team of scientists deciphered some of the more elusive instructions encoded in DNA. Their neural network trained on high-resolution maps of protein-DNA interactions uncovers subtle DNA sequence patterns throughout the genome, thus providing a deeper understanding of how these sequences are organized to regulate genes. Artificial intelligence algorithms are extremely powerful at fitting massive and complex datasets. But their interpretation, rationalizing how the…

LHC/ATLAS Creation of matter in an interaction of two photons belongs to a class of very rare phenomena. From the data of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, collected with the new AFP proton detectors at the highest energies available to-date, a more accurate – and more interesting – picture of the phenomena occurring during photon collisions is emerging. If you point a glowing flashlight towards another one, you do not expect any spectacular phenomena. The photons emitted by both…

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and the partner institute Empa have started a joint initiative called SynFuels. The goal is to develop a process for producing kerosene from renewable resources. In this way liquid fuel mixtures of the highest quality, which would allow the most residue-free combustion possible and thus be suitable for aircraft propulsion, should be obtainable using carbon dioxide and hydrogen from renewable resources. Mobility without fossil fuels – in aviation too: SynFuels, the new joint…

Toward the development of drugs for aging-related diseases In the search for ways to effectively combat age-related human disease, the enzyme sirtuin 6 (Sirt6) has recently become a focus of biochemical research. A targeted activation of Sirt6 could prevent or mitigate such diseases, for example some types of cancer. In a paper for the journal “Nature Chemical Biology”, biochemists from the University of Bayreuth have now shown how the small molecule MDL-801 binds to the enzyme Sirt6 and influences its…

They are also called power plants of the cells: the mitochondria. They are present in almost all eukaryotic cells and they supply the cells with energy. Until now, it was assumed that only mitochondria can act as the cells’ energy providers. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology have now discovered that symbiotic bacteria can fulfil this function too. Their findings shed a completely new light on the survival of simple eukaryotes in oxygen-free environments. These results have…

… in development of psychiatric drugs Glycine can stimulate or inhibit neurons in the brain, thereby controlling complex functions. Unraveling the three-dimensional structure of the glycine transporter, researchers have now come a big step closer to understanding the regulation of glycine in the brain. These results, which have been published in Nature, open up opportunities to find effective drugs that inhibit GlyT1 function, with major implications for the treatment of schizophrenia and other mental disorders. Glycine is the smallest amino…

The conditions on Earth are ideal for life. Most places on our planet are neither too hot nor too cold and offer liquid water. These and other requirements for life, however, delicately depend on the right composition of the atmosphere. Too little or too much of certain gases – like carbon dioxide – and Earth could become a ball of ice or turn into a pressure cooker. When scientists look for potentially habitable planets, a key component is therefore their…

Robots solving computer games, recognizing human voices, or helping in finding optimal medical treatments: those are only a few astonishing examples of what the field of artificial intelligence has produced in the past years. The ongoing race for better machines has led to the question of how and with what means improvements can be achieved. In parallel, huge recent progress in quantum technologies have confirmed the power of quantum physics, not only for its often peculiar and puzzling theories, but…

UChicago study finds way that hot, rocky planets in other systems could form and keep atmospheres. An atmosphere is what makes life on Earth’s surface possible, regulating our climate and sheltering us from damaging cosmic rays. But although telescopes have counted a growing number of rocky planets, scientists had thought most of their atmospheres long lost. However, a new study by University of Chicago and Stanford University researchers suggests a mechanism whereby these planets could not only develop atmospheres full…

Radio observations of a cold, dense cloud of molecular gas reveal more than a dozen unexpected molecules. Scientists have discovered a vast, previously unknown reservoir of new aromatic material in a cold, dark molecular cloud by detecting individual polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules in the interstellar medium for the first time, and in doing so are beginning to answer a three-decades-old scientific mystery: how and where are these molecules formed in space? “We had always thought polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were primarily…

… high-altitude pseudo-satellites in Action A flight planning system to ensure nationwide coverage with information from high altitudes. High Altitude Pseudo Satellites (HAPS) are unmanned aerial vehicles that fly in the stratosphere. They provide for instance earth observation data and can be used for telecommunications applications such as 5G. The goal of project OBeLiSk is to develop, for the first time, an operational concept for safe and efficient airspace integration of HAPS. To ensure safety in the airspace, Technische Universität…

The surface of the moon is well mapped, but the same is not true for its subsurface. In preparation for future lunar missions, the European Space Agency (ESA) was looking for innovative ideas on how caves and lava tubes on the moon could be discovered, studied and measured. Scientists and students from Jacobs University Bremen are involved in one of the two concepts that have been accepted. Millions of craters cover the lunar surface. But photos also show steep faced…

SMN or in full Survival Motor Neuron: Professor Utz Fischer has been analyzing this protein and the large molecular complex of the same name, of which SMN is one of the building blocks, for many years. He holds the Chair of the Department of Biochemistry at the Julius-Maximilian’s University of Würzburg (JMU), and he first discovered the molecule during his search for the root cause of spinal muscular atrophy. As scientists found out a few years ago, this disease is…

Growing cities tend to run out of land for waste management and new landfill sites. Artificial Intelligence can help city managers create more powerful long-term forecasts of solid waste volumes and landfill requirements, even with missing or inaccurate data. UJ researchers found that a 10-neuron model produced the best 30-year forecast for municipal solid waste in a growing city. All over the world, large cities are running out of space for municipal solid waste. Existing landfill sites are rapidly filling…

An international research team has made progress towards improved materials for quantum sensor technology. Medicine, navigation and IT could benefit from this in the future. Boron nitride is a technologically interesting material because it is very compatible with other two-dimensional crystalline structures. It therefore opens up pathways to artificial heterostructures or electronic devices built on them with fundamentally new properties. About a year ago, a team from the Institute of Physics at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, succeeded in…