About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same … Read more
In a recent study published in Science Advances, materials scientists Julie A. Jackson and colleagues presented a new class of materials architecture called field-responsive mechanical metamaterials (FRMM). The FRMMs exhibit dynamic control and on-the-fly tunability for designing and selecting the construct’s composition and structure. Typically, properties of mechanical metamaterials are programmed and set when the … Read more
Move over, trap-jaw ants and mantis shrimp: There’s a faster appendage in town. According to a new study, the Dracula ant, Mystrium camillae, can snap its mandibles at speeds of up to 90 meters per second (more than 200 mph), making it the fastest animal movement on record. “The high accelerations of Mystrium strikes likely … Read more
A future warmer world will almost certainly feature a decline in fresh water from the Sierra Nevada mountain snowpack. Now a new study by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) that analyzed the headwater regions of California’s 10 major reservoirs, representing nearly half of the state’s surface storage, found they could … Read more
As on Earth, so in space. A four-satellite mission that is studying magnetic reconnection the breaking apart and explosive reconnection of the magnetic field lines in plasma that occurs throughout the universe has found key aspects of the process in space to be strikingly similar to those found in experiments at the U.S. Department of … Read more
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have used nuclear resonance vibrational spectroscopy to probe the hydrogen bonds that modulate the chemical reactivity of enzymes, catalysts and biomimetic complexes. The technique could lead to the development of better catalysts for use in a wide range of fields. The findings were published as a “Very Important Paper” in … Read more
A team of international researchers led by engineers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have invented a new magnetic device to manipulate digital information 20 times more efficiently and with 10 times more stability than commercial spintronic digital memories. The novel spintronic memory device employs ferrimagnets and was developed in collaboration with researchers from … Read more
China launched a rover early Saturday destined to land on the far side of the moon, a global first that would boost Beijing’s ambitions to become a space superpower, state media said. The Chang’e-4 lunar probe mission named after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology launched on a Long March 3B rocket from the southwestern … Read more
The venom of insects such as wasps and bees is full of compounds that can kill bacteria. Unfortunately, many of these compounds are also toxic to humans, making it impossible to use them as antibiotic drugs. After performing a systematic study of the antimicrobial properties of a toxin normally found in a South American wasp, … Read more
In the ongoing hunt for more effective weapons against malaria, international researchers said Thursday they are exploring a pathway that has until now been little studied killing parasites in the liver before the illness emerges. “It’s very difficult to work on the liver stage,” said Elizabeth Winzeler, professor of pharmacology and drug discovery at University … Read more
Australian scientists have investigated new directions to scale up qubits utilising the spin-orbit coupling of atom qubits adding a new suite of tools to the armoury. Spin-orbit coupling, the coupling of the qubits’ orbital and spin degree of freedom, allows the manipulation of the qubit via electric, rather than magnetic fields. Using the electric dipole coupling … Read more
Over the past few years, classical convolutional neural networks (cCNNs) have led to remarkable advances in computer vision. Many of these algorithms can now categorize objects in good quality images with high accuracy. However, in real-world applications, such as autonomous driving or robotics, imaging data rarely includes pictures taken under ideal lighting conditions. Often, the … Read more
Holography is a powerful tool that can reconstruct wavefronts of light and combine the fundamental wave properties of amplitude, phase, polarization, wave vector and frequency. Smart multiplexing techniques (multiple signal integration) together with metasurface designs are currently in high demand to explore the capacity to engineer information storage systems and enhance optical encryption security using … Read more
New research from scientists at Imperial College London unravels how so-called bacterial persister cells manipulate our immune cells. The work potentially opens new avenues to finding ways of clearing these bacterial cells from the body and stopping recurrence of the bacterial infection. The latest findings, published in the journal Science, may help explain why some people … Read more
With a reach of nearly 6 feet (2 meters), the arm will be used to pick up science instruments from the lander’s deck, gently setting them on the Martian surface at Elysium Planitia, the lava plain where InSight touched down on Nov. 26. But first, the arm will use its Instrument Deployment Camera, located on … Read more