Physicists from the University of Regensburg develop a new method for counting molecules. Who hasn’t looked at the sky on a mild summer night and thought about the vastness of the universe? The trained eye can see the Andromeda galaxy as a distant spot. Thanks to the latest telescopes, we know that it consists of over a trillion stars. In the “nanocosm”, clusters of individual light sources, such as molecules, also appear as points. Resolving these light sources spatially is…

Hurricane resembling those in lower atmosphere observed over Earth’s polar ionosphere. The first observations of a space hurricane have been revealed in Earth’s upper atmosphere, confirming their existence and shedding new light on the relationship between planets and space. Hurricanes in the Earth’s low atmosphere are known, but they had never before been detected in the upper atmosphere. An international team of scientists led by Shandong University in China analysed observations made by satellites in 2014 to reveal a long-lasting…

Mobility of skyrmions in geometric structures depends on their arrangement. In a close collaboration between experimental and theoretical physicists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the research groups of Professor Mathias Kläui and Dr. Peter Virnau investigated the behavior of magnetic whirls within nanoscale geometric structures. In their work published in “Advanced Functional Materials”, the researchers confined small magnetic whirls, so-called skyrmions, in geometric structures. Skyrmions can be created in thin metal films and have particle-like properties: They exhibit high…

International team of researchers investigates how evolution forms the structure and function of a newly emerged protein in flies. Proteins are the key component in all modern forms of life. Haemoglobin, for example, transports the oxygen in our blood; photosynthesis proteins in the leaves of plants convert sunlight into energy; and fungal enzymes help us to brew beer and bake bread. Researchers have long been examining the question of how proteins mutate or come into existence in the course of…

This unusual electronic energy structure could be harnessed for technologies of interest in quantum information science and electronics. Electrons in a solid occupy distinct energy bands separated by gaps. Energy band gaps are an electronic “no man’s land,” an energy range where no electrons are allowed. Now, scientists studying a compound containing iron, tellurium, and selenium have found that an energy band gap opens at a point where two allowed energy bands intersect on the material’s surface. They observed this…

Sulfolane-additive process yields easy fabrication, low cost, top performance, long operating life. A new, simpler solution process for fabricating stable perovskite solar cells overcomes the key bottleneck to large-scale production and commercialization of this promising renewable-energy technology, which has remained tantalizingly out of reach for more than a decade. “Our work paves the way for low-cost, high-throughput commercial-scale production of large-scale solar modules in the near future,” said Wanyi Nie, a research scientist fellow in the Center of Integrated Nanotechnologies…

Newly discovered group of cells in the root tip reacts to potassium deficiency and directs signalling pathways mediating plant adaptation. Potassium is an essential nutrient for all living things. Plants need it in large quantities, especially for growth and in order to withstand stress better. For this reason, they absorb large quantities of potassium from the soil. In agriculture, this leads to a lack of available potassium in the soil – which is why the mineral is an important component…

Scientists at MIPT have found a possible explanation for the anomalously fast release of gas from nuclear fuel. Supercomputer simulations have uncovered an unexpected mechanism for accelerating the escape of gas bubbles from the uranium dioxide crystal matrix to the surface. The result points the way to eliminate the paradoxical discrepancy of several orders of magnitude between existing theoretical models and experimental results. The paper was published in the Journal of Nuclear Materials. The diffusion of gas bubbles during reactor…

Technology project with Heidelberg participation wants to develop compact cell-imaging for extensive application. Advancing research into how viruses penetrate and act on human cells requires powerful cell imaging approaches. Soft X-ray microscopy is particularly suitable but has so far not been widely available. A pan-European research project called “Compact Cell-Imaging Device” with Heidelberg participation seeks to develop this technology for extensive application in medical research. How do viral pathogens succeed in penetrating human cells? Which cellular mechanisms do they use…

The deployment of personal electronic deterrents is an effective way to prevent future deaths and injuries. With shark bites increasing in countries like Australia – scientists say the use of personal electronic deterrents is an effective way to prevent future deaths and injuries which could save the lives of up to 1063 Australians along the coastline over the next 50 years. The research, published in scientific journal Royal Society Open Science, shows that while shark bites are rare events, strategies…

The year-to-year change in the amount of carbon taken up by Earth’s land ecosystems is primarily driven by variations in soil moisture which is affecting air humidity. This has been found by an international team of scientists including Markus Reichstein and Martin Jung from Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. Surprisingly, variations in soil moisture affect land carbon uptake mostly indirectly, through mechanisms coupling land ecosystems and atmospheric properties. Earth’s land ecosystems absorb a large portion of carbon…

Pufferfish-inspired device relies on sunlight to produce clean drinking water. A new invention that uses sunlight to drive water purification could help solve the problem of providing clean water off the grid. The device resembles a large sponge that soaks up water but leaves contaminants – like lead, oil and pathogens – behind. To collect the purified water from the sponge, one simply places it in sunlight. The researchers described the device in a paper published this week in the…

Glassy materials play an integral role in the modern world, but inherent brittleness has long been the Achilles’ heel that severely limits their usefulness. Due to the disordered amorphous structure of glassy materials, many mysteries remain. These include the fracture mechanisms of traditional glasses, such as silicate glasses, as well as the origin of the intriguing patterned fracture morphologies of metallic glasses. Cavitation has been widely assumed to be the underlying mechanism governing the fracture of metallic glasses, as well…

Nanographene is flexible, yet stronger than steel. With unique physical and electronic properties, the material consists of carbon molecules only one atom thick arranged in a honeycomb shape. Still early in technological development, current fabrication methods require the addition of substituents to obtain a uniform material. Additive-free methods result in flimsy, breakable fibers–until now. An international team of researchers has developed self-assembling, stable and strong nanographene wires. The results were published on March 24 in Journal of the American Chemical…

By mashing up brains from various insect species, neuroscientists at the University of Arizona were able to count the neurons in individual brains, providing a more meaningful metric than traditional studies measuring brain size or weight. Using a surprisingly simple technique, researchers in the University of Arizona Department of Neuroscience have succeeded in approximating how many brain cells make up the brains of several species of bees, ants and wasps. The work revealed that certain species of bees have a…

To illustrate the effects of climate change on nature at a glance, scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are now presenting Green Warming Stripes for the first time. Annette Menzel, Professor of Ecoclimatology at the TUM, explains in an interview how we can interpret them and what they mean. We understand that Green Climate or Warming Stripes can illustrate nature’s responses to global warming, but how can we decode the colored stripes? Blue colors represent years with cold…

It is always exciting to find new isotopes with extreme neutron/proton numbers in nuclear physics research. In the region of heavy nuclei, α-decay is one of the pervasive decay modes and plays an essential role in searching for new isotopes. However, even after about a century of studying α-decay, scientists still cannot perfectly describe how the α-particle is formed at the surface of the nucleus before its emission. In the α-decay process, the α-particle can be regarded not only as…

New optics-on-a-chip device paves way to capturing fast chemical, material and biological processes. Researchers have developed new x-ray optics that can be used to harness extremely fast pulses in a package that is significantly smaller and lighter than conventional devices used to modulate x-rays. The new optics are based on microscopic chip-based devices known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). “Our new ultrafast optics-on-a-chip is poised to enable x-ray research and applications that could have a broad impact on understanding fast-evolving chemical,…

Astronomers have discovered a pulsar – a dense and rapidly spinning neutron star sending radio waves into the cosmos–using a low-frequency radio telescope in outback Australia. The pulsar was detected with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, in Western Australia’s remote Mid West region. It’s the first time scientists have discovered a pulsar with the MWA but they believe it will be the first of many. The finding is a sign of things to come from the multi-billion-dollar Square Kilometre…

Artificial Intelligence tools enable researchers to ‘shake hands’ with ancient scribes. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered some seventy years ago, are famous for containing the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and many hitherto unknown ancient Jewish texts. But the individual people behind the scrolls have eluded scientists, because the scribes are anonymous. Now, by combining the sciences and the humanities, University of Groningen researchers have cracked the code, which enables them to discover the scribes behind the…