The motion of single atoms through liquid has been caught on camera for the first time. Using a sandwich of materials so thin they’re effectively two-dimensional, scientists trapped and observed platinum atoms ‘swimming’ along a surface under different pressures. The results will help us better understand how the presence of liquid alters the behavior
Month: July 2022
A newly developed, water-activated disposable paper battery promises to make a big impact on single-use electronics – those temporary gadgets used in medical and industrial fields where electronic waste can quickly start piling up. The battery that has been demonstrated by researchers is biodegradable, made from sustainable materials, and cheap to put together. What’s
A climate scientist at Tohoku University in Japan has run the numbers and does not think today’s mass extinction event will equal that of the previous five. At least not for many more centuries to come. On more than one occasion over the past 540 million years, Earth has lost most of its species
Grab any physics textbook and you’ll find formula after formula describing how things wobble, fly, swerve and stop. The formulas describe actions we can observe, but behind each could be sets of factors that aren’t immediately obvious. Now, a new AI program developed by researchers at Columbia University has seemingly discovered its own alternative
Peer long enough into the heavens, and the Universe starts to resemble a city at night. Galaxies take on characteristics of streetlamps cluttering up neighborhoods of dark matter, linked by highways of gas that run along the shores of intergalactic nothingness. This map of the Universe was preordained, laid out in the tiniest of
Humankind marks a dubious milestone Thursday, the day by which humanity has consumed all Earth can sustainably produce for this year, with NGOs warning the rest of 2022 will be lived in resource deficit. The date – dubbed “Earth Overshoot Day” – marks a tipping point when people have used up “all that ecosystems
A third set of human remains were found in Nevada’s Lake Mead on 25 July as water levels have receded to historic lows during a drought fueled by climate change. The remains were spotted by a witness at Swim Beach on Lake Mead during the afternoon of 25 July, the National Park Service announced. Investigators retrieved the
At 5:29 am on the morning of 16 July 1945, in the state of New Mexico, a dreadful slice of history was made. The dawn calm was torn asunder as the United States Army detonated a plutonium implosion device known as the Gadget – the world’s very first test of a nuclear bomb, known as
When mechanical engineering graduate student Faye Yap saw a dead spider curled up in the hallway, it got her thinking about whether it could be used as a robotics component. Turning dead spiders into mechanical grippers may be some people’s idea of a nightmare scenario, but it could have tangible benefits. Spider legs can grip
When the history of the rise of the robots is written, perhaps this might feature in the opening chapter: a seven-year-old boy has had his finger broken by a robotic opponent during a chess match in Moscow. There’s some debate about exactly what happened, but it seems that the youngster took a move faster
Plants can go to extraordinary lengths to tempt pollinators to do their bidding. From donning female insect disguises (complete with pheromones!) to lure lustful males, oozing the stench of rotting flesh to temp hungry flies, or, most commonly, offering bribes of sweet rewards for any who visits – no lengths are too gross or pricy
A team of physicists has used a pair of vibrating rods to measure the gravitational constant to incredibly fine precision. While the new technique has relatively high uncertainty, they hope that future improvements will provide a new pathway to nailing down this elusive constant. The gravitational constant, denoted as G, is the fundamental building
A digital twin is a copy of a person, product, or process that is created using data. This might sound like science fiction, but some have claimed that you will likely have a digital double within the next decade. As a copy of a person, a digital twin would – ideally – make the
Every five years, the Australian government releases a comprehensive report on the state of the nation’s environment, put together by a panel of independent scientists. The latest report, released this week, was long overdue and was always expected to be a doozy. In the past five years, severe coral bleaching events have whitened a third
A new phase of matter has been observed in a quantum computer after physicists pulsed light on its qubits in a pattern inspired by the Fibonacci sequence. If you think that’s mind-boggling, this weird quirk of quantum mechanics behaves as though it has two time dimensions, instead of one; a trait that scientists say makes the qubits
The UK has provisionally recorded its highest ever temperature on Tuesday: 102.4 °F (40.2 °C). It was the first time the UK recorded a temperature over 102 °F (40 °C) per the Met Office, the official weather organization in Britain. The reading was taken around London’s Heathrow Airport just before 1pm local time. Temperatures were
If chemists built cars, they’d fill a factory with car parts, set it on fire, and sift from the ashes pieces that now looked vaguely car-like. When you’re dealing with car-parts the size of atoms, this is a perfectly reasonable process. Yet chemists yearn for ways to reduce the waste and make reactions far more
Firefighters battled to contain wildfires sweeping across southwest Europe on Sunday as a heatwave showed no sign of abating, with Britain poised to set new temperature records this coming week. Blazes raging in France, Greece, Portugal and Spain have destroyed thousands of hectares of land and forced thousands of residents and holidaymakers to flee.
Water gets boiled a lot – whether it’s a cup of tea brewing in a kitchen or a power plant generating electricity. Any improvements in the efficiency of this process will have a huge impact on the overall amount of energy used for it every day. One such improvement could come with a newly
Tiny gelatinous blobs spin perfect pirouettes in the water – their movement whipping up a force that attracts their neighbors. As enough of them gather together, this synchronized dance aligns them into precise six-sided, ordered, repeating patterns, just like carbon atoms in a graphene crystalline structure. But these aren’t atoms or any type of
Before quantum computers and quantum networks can fulfil their huge potential, scientists have got several difficult problems to overcome – but a new study outlines a potential solution to one of these problems. As we’ve seen in recent research, the silicon material that our existing classical computing components are made out of has shown potential for
The vast expanse of Lake Taupō’s sky blue waters, crowned by hazy, mountainous horizons, invokes an extreme sense of tranquility. And yet, deep in the ground below, geological unrest is brewing, according to a new paper in the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics. Lake Taupō is the largest freshwater lake in Australasia,
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are already way ahead of us in certain areas – playing Go, for example, or crunching huge sets of data – but in other aspects AI is still a long way behind human beings, even just a few months after we’re born. For example, even young babies instinctively know know
For the first time, physicists have witnessed something incredibly exciting: electrons forming whirlpools just like a fluid. This behavior is one that scientists have long predicted, but never observed before. And it could be the key to developing more efficient and faster next-generation electronics. “Electron vortices are expected in theory, but there’s been no
It supports life as we know it. Source link
Physicists say they’ve found evidence in data from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider for three never-before-seen combinations of quarks, just as the world’s largest particle-smasher is beginning a new round of high-energy experiments. The three exotic types of particles – which include two four-quark combinations, known as tetraquarks, plus a five-quark unit called a pentaquark – are
The process of freeze drying really is punching above its (very light) weight. It makes for a delicious chocolate-covered strawberry, gives astronauts expanded food options, and now, the technique could be used to store DNA and cell information for cloning purposes. With a success rate as low as 0.2 percent, freeze drying of cells
Parts of Portugal and Spain are the driest they have been in a thousand years due to an atmospheric high-pressure system driven by climate change, according to research published Monday, warning of severe implications for wine and olive production. The Azores High, an area of high pressure that rotates clockwise over parts of the
When disordered magnetic materials are cooled to just the right temperature, something interesting happens. The spins of their atoms ‘freeze’ and lock into place in a static pattern, exhibiting cooperative behavior not usually displayed. Now for the first time, physicists have seen the opposite. When fractionally heated, the naturally occurring magnetic element neodymium freezes,
Artificial intelligence (AI) can devise methods of wealth distribution that are more popular than systems designed by people, new research suggests. The findings, made by a team of researchers at UK-based AI company DeepMind, show that machine learning systems aren’t just good at solving complex physics and biology problems, but may also help deliver on
Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works. The world’s largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades
A “wet wipe island” the size of two tennis courts has formed in the Thames, causing the river as it flows through London to change course, according to The Times of London. Ministers have asked people to stop using wet wipes, and the government is considering banning those that contain plastic. Fleur Anderson, a Labour
Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels requires reaching net zero emissions by the middle of this century. This means that, in less than three decades, we need to reverse more than a century of rising emissions and bring annual emissions down to near zero, while balancing out all remaining unavoidable emissions by
With researchers warning that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C is fast slipping from our grasp, we know it will take a mammoth effort to reach. But the scale of emissions reductions required is actually something we have already achieved before – quite recently and rather by accident. In 2020, global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions