Engineers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have created a new shape-changing or “morphing” 3D printing nozzle that was featured as a Frontispiece in the January 5th issue of the journal Advanced Materials Technologies. The team’s morphing nozzle offers researchers new means for 3D printing “fiber-filled composites” – materials made up of short fibers that […]
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Stretching Diamond for Next-Generation Microelectronics
Diamond is the hardest material in nature. But out of many expectations, it also has great potential as an excellent electronic material. A joint research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has demonstrated for the first time the large, uniform tensile elastic straining of microfabricated diamond arrays through the nanomechanical approach. Their […]
AI-designed serotonin sensor may help scientists study sleep and mental health
Serotonin is a neurochemical that plays a critical role in the way the brain controls our thoughts and feelings. For example, many antidepressants are designed to alter serotonin signals sent between neurons. In an article in Cell, National Institutes of Health-funded researchers described how they used advanced genetic engineering techniques to transform a bacterial protein […]
World’s Smallest Atom-Memory Unit Created
Faster, smaller, smarter and more energy-efficient chips for everything from consumer electronics to big data to brain-inspired computing could soon be on the way after engineers at The University of Texas at Austin created the smallest memory device yet. And in the process, they figured out the physics dynamic that unlocks dense memory storage capabilities […]
New Technology Allows More Precise View Of The Smallest Nanoparticles
Current state-of-the-art techniques have clear limitations when it comes to imaging the smallest nanoparticles, making it difficult for researchers to study viruses and other structures at the molecular level. Scientists from the University of Houston and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center have reported in Nature Communications a new optical imaging technology for […]
Scientists Develop Method To Detect Charge Traps In Organic Semiconductors
Scientists at Swansea University have developed a very sensitive method to detect the tiny signatures of so called ‘charge traps’ in organic semiconductors. The research, published in Nature Communications and supported by the Welsh Government through the European Regional Development Fund, may change views about what limits the performance of organic solar cells, photodetectors and […]
Star Clusters Are Only The Tip Of The Iceberg
“Clusters form big families of stars that can stay together for large parts of their lifetime. Today, we know of roughly a few thousand star clusters in the Milky Way, but we only recognize them because of their prominent appearance as rich and tight groups of stars. Given enough time, stars tend to leave their […]
Hunting For The Lowest Known Nuclear-Excited State
Nuclear clocks could make our time measurement even more accurate than atomic clocks. The key to this lies in thorium-229, an atomic nucleus whose lowest excited state has very low energy. A research team from the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics at the University of Heidelberg, TU Wien, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the Helmholtz Institute […]
The Most Sensitive And Fastest Graphene Microwave Bolometer
Bolometers are devices that measure the power of incident electromagnetic radiation thru the heating of materials, which exhibit a temperature-electric resistance dependence. These instruments are among the most sensitive detectors so far used for infrared radiation detection and are key tools for applications that range from advanced thermal imaging, night vision, infrared spectroscopy to observational […]
Device Could Help Detect Signs Of Extraterrestrial Life
Although Earth is uniquely situated in the solar system to support creatures that call it home, different forms of life could have once existed, or might still exist, on other planets. But finding traces of past or current lifeforms on other worlds is challenging. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Analytical Chemistry have developed a fully […]