Lifeboat Foundation

In the southern sky shine two smudges, known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. They are satellite galaxies of the much larger Milky Way, and one of their qualities has puzzled scientists. As the Clouds tumble through space, the Milky Way should be exerting enough gravitational force to knock loose their star-making material. But the smaller galaxies are still building new stars. A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature finally explains it.

What they did — “A lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there,” Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College and lead author of the new study, says in a NASA description of the paper. “If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?”

Structural defects in metal”“organic frameworks can be exploited to tune material properties. In the case of UiO-66 material, they may change its nature from hydrophobic to…

For billions of years, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds – the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies – have followed a perilous journey. Orbiting one another as they are pulled in toward our home galaxy, they have begun to unravel, leaving behind trails of gaseous debris. And yet these dwarf galaxies remain intact, with ongoing vigorous star formation, leaving astronomers baffled.

“A lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there,” said Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College. “If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?”

A team of astronomers led by Krishnarao has finally found the answer, with the help of data from NASA.

Standard silkworm silk has been made stronger than spider’s silk, one of the toughest materials known, by bathing it with metals and respinning it.

Some solid materials have a memory of how they have previously been stretched out, which impacts how they respond to these kinds of deformations in the future. A new Penn State study lends insight into memory formation in the foams and emulsions common in food products and pharmaceuticals and provides a new method to erase this memory, which could guide how materials are prepared for future use.

“A crease in a piece of paper serves as a memory of being folded or crumpled,” said Nathan Keim, associate research professor of physics at Penn State who led the study. “A lot of other materials form memories when they are deformed, heated up, or cooled down, and you might not know it unless you ask the right questions. Improving our understanding of how to write, read, and erase memories provides new opportunities for diagnostics and programming of materials. We can find out the history of a material by doing some tests or erase a material’s memory and program a new one to prepare it for consumer or industrial use.”

The researchers studied memory in a type of material called disordered solids, which have particles that are often erratically arranged. For example, ice cream is a disordered solid made up of a combination of ice crystals, fat droplets, and air pockets mixed together in a random way. This is in stark contrast to materials with “crystalline structures,” with particles arranged in highly ordered rows and columns. Disordered solids are common in food sciences, consumer products, and pharmaceuticals and include foams like ice cream and emulsions like mayonnaise.

Add analog and air-driven to the list of control system options for soft robots.

In a study published online this week, robotics researchers, engineers and materials scientists from Rice University and Harvard University showed it is possible to make programmable, nonelectronic circuits that control the actions of soft robots by processing information encoded in bursts of compressed air.

Continue reading “Fluidic circuits add analog options for controlling soft robots” »

Clouds are made of silicate minerals.

The clouds of the distant brown dwarf contain silicate material, making it a quite unusual atmospheric composition.

Scientists have discovered a fluorescent protein that flouts trade-off relationships.

Scientific research institute RIKEN produced bright and photostable green fluorescent protein from Japanese jellyfish. Published in Nature Biotechnology.

Proteins that emit green light when illuminated are effective instruments for capturing images of intricate cell architecture. Such fluorescent proteins can be attached to target structures of interest, which light up when exposed to blue light.

Continue reading “Japanese scientists produce bright and photostable green fluorescent protein from jellyfish” »

A prototype computer built using a magnetic material called a skyrmion has been programmed to recognise handwritten digits. The approach could be particularly energy-efficient.