“transducer” concept could explain consciousness, dreams, genius, and around 90 mysterious phenomena.
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Get Support For Adaptive Sports
Exciting news for anyone considering a Hero Flex, thanks to the Challenged Athletes Foundation (Challenged Athletes Foundation)! 💙
CAF exists because health insurance almost never covers sport specific equipment, even when it’s the thing that gets someone back to the sport they love. Sport is deemed a lot of the time ‘not medically necessary’, but seeing how so many of our users thrive in their sport, we’d like to differ! CAF made supporting disabled athletes their mission and since starting, they’ve awarded over 60,000 grants to athletes across 105 sports.
Applications open today, September 28, and close November 13 at 5pm PT. 🚴♂️ 🏋️♂️ 🦾
If you or someone in your family has a permanent physical disability and wants to get into sports or back to it, it’s worth applying!
You also don’t have to do it alone. Your local Open Bionics CPO can book a Hero FLEX consultation and go through the CAF eligibility criteria with you.
Apply here: https://www.challengedathletes.org/caf-athletes/
#HeroFLEX #HeroArmy #Prosthetics #ChallengedAthletesFoundation #AdaptiveSports
Scandium’s electrons may explain predicted room-temperature superconductivity
Scientists have confirmed the existence of a predicted room temperature superconductor, while explaining the microscopic mechanism that distinguishes it from a similar one discovered several years ago. The work, published in the journal Physical Review B, offers “a theoretical blueprint for the future design of superior superconductor hydrides” the physicists write.
High temperature superconductors have been a holy grail of materials sciences for decades. There has been success in finding metal clathrate superhydrides such as LaH10. (“Superhydrides” are hydrogen-rich materials.) In 2018 the discovery of its superconductivity was announced in a preprint; and half a year later in the journal Nature.
Its critical temperature, below which the material is superconducting (offers no resistance to an electric current, and magnetic fields are expelled from the material) was up to −13°C, a record high at the time, albeit at a pressure of 188 billion pascals (GPa)—1.9 million times the atmosphere’s surface pressure on Earth.
Crystal spacing predicts magnetic states in complex alloys better than electron count
In materials chemistry, identifying common parameters that can organize magnetic ground states across complex intermetallic compounds remains a central challenge. Researchers have long used chemically tunable parameters to control magnetic properties. One is valence-electron concentration, commonly discussed as the electron-per-atom (e/a) ratio. The e/a ratio has been widely used to classify magnetic ground states in metallic systems such as Heusler alloys and approximant crystals.
In gold (Au)-based Tsai-type approximant crystals, the e/a ratio has been found to control magnetic ground states, including long-range antiferromagnetic (AFM) and ferromagnetic (FM) orders, as well as the spin-glass state. Tsai-type compounds are generally described as structures built from clusters with multiple shells, in which the moment-bearing rare-earth element occupies an icosahedral site. The predictive power of e/a, however, is limited across different alloy families and constituent elements. Given the potential of quasicrystal-based intermetallics as platforms for exploring emerging magnetic phenomena, researchers need reliable, experimentally accessible parameters to identify and guide the development of their magnetic properties.
To address this gap, a research team led by Assistant Professor Farid Labib of the Research Institute for Science and Technology at Tokyo University of Science (TUS), Japan, and Associate Professor Kazuhiro Nawa of the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials at Tohoku University, Japan, along with Professor Ryuji Tamura of TUS, investigated whether the lattice parameter could serve as a unified structural parameter for magnetic ground state selection in Tsai-type icosahedral compounds.
Enantioresolution turns bright but racemic gold-silver clusters into circularly polarized emitters
Chiral metal clusters that emit circularly polarized light often face a trade-off between photoluminescence efficiency and luminescence dissymmetry. A study published in the journal Advanced Optical Materials tested whether highly luminescent racemic carbon-centered gold(I)-silver(I) clusters could be converted into bright CPL emitters by enantioresolution with chiral donor ligands.
Researchers have shown that treating highly luminescent but racemic carbon-centered gold(I)-silver(I) clusters with chiral oxygen-donor ligands can separate them into mirror-image forms (enantiomers) that retain strong photoluminescence while gaining the ability to emit circularly polarized light.
A phosphate-protected enantiomer pair achieved a photoluminescence quantum yield of 0.92÷0.93 and the largest luminescence dissymmetry factor (|glum | = 0.008) among the clusters tested. Incorporating the cluster into a composite device with a cholesteric liquid crystal raised the measured device-level |glum | to 1.25.
Rotating light pattern reveals laser frequency in a single image
An international team of physicists has developed a new method for determining the precise color of laser light using an image that rotates as the laser’s frequency shifts.
The finding could offer a new way to ensure that lasers are ‘locked’ to the frequencies needed by technologies that rely on them, from GPS positioning to quantum sensors. It could also spur developments in spectroscopy, magnetometry and quantum communications.
In a new paper published in the journal Optica, the University of Glasgow-led team describes how it devised a way to determine the frequency of a laser beam in a single snapshot.
Revisiting a Young Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton is typically portrayed as a solitary scientist with intense focus who was obsessed with power and deeply egotistical. But a new book by Caltech historians Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold takes a deeper look at Newton’s life in the two decades leading up to the 1687 publication of his groundbreaking text, Principia Mathematica, when he was 44. Using newly digitized scans of Newton’s early writings, Buchwald and Feingold uncover a portrait of the young polymath as a curious and social scholar whose interests were often fleeting.
How the moon and sun may trigger slow earthquakes on Earth
While not quite a fatal attraction, the gravitational pull of the moon and sun creates tiny stresses on Earth that can trigger events known as slow earthquakes. These are movements along fault lines (fault slips) that release their energy gradually over much longer periods than ordinary quakes. Although they have been observed, exactly how these celestial bodies trigger them has been a relatively tough nut to crack.
So a team of geoscientists led by Yishuo Zhou at PSL University in Paris created computer models of these fault lines to find out what is going on.
Overlooked lakes may be helping to keep the Northern Hemisphere cool
Lakes may cover only a small fraction of Earth’s surface, but new research suggests they play a bigger role in regulating the planet’s climate than previously recognized. By reflecting sunlight back into space when covered in snow and ice, lakes in the Northern Hemisphere have a stronger cooling effect than the surrounding land.
Dr. Sarah Cooley of Duke University and colleagues say their results highlight an overlooked part of Earth’s climate system that could be better represented in climate models, which scientists use to understand how the planet responds to changing environmental conditions.