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Controlled cracking technique prints quantum dots into tiny pixels for sharper displays

Recent technological advances have enabled the development of increasingly sophisticated, sharper displays for electronic devices. Many modern displays use light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, tiny semiconductor-based components that emit light when an electrical current passes through them.

Scientists uncover the aluminium shield that helps a tiny crustacean survive darkness, nearfreezing water and crushing pressure in the Mariana Trench

Nearly seven miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean lies a place so hostile that only a handful of human beings in all of history have ever seen it. Total darkness, near-freezing water, and pressure equivalent to a jet’s weight bearing down on a single postage stamp define this world.

Chemists set electrons free and break a decades-old chemistry barrier

Chemists have developed a catalyst that breaks a long-standing rule governing which molecules receive electrons during chemical reactions. By releasing electrons directly into solution, the technique could unlock reactions—and potentially useful new molecules—that were previously out of reach.

Oldest known giant rock scallop bead suggests California coastal trade began millennia earlier

Archaeologists have discovered two giant rock scallop beads that push back the clock on the first appearance of these high-status ornaments. The discovery shows that these prized marine beads were traded hundreds of miles from the California coast thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

Radiocarbon dating places one of the beads at roughly 8,500 years old, making it the oldest ever discovered. More unusually, they were found more than 42 miles (68 kilometers) from the nearest coast, extending the known range of these ornaments from the Channel Islands to the California interior.

“It’s cool that this is the oldest of its kind identified so far, but cooler still to view it as part of a broader Early Holocene cultural landscape seemingly well-established in this locale as much as 10,000 years ago,” said Barry A. Price, an archaeologist at Applied EarthWorks Inc. and one of the study’s authors, along with Simone Schinsing and Jasmine Kidwell. The study is published in California Archaeology.

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