Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology and the National Institute for Material Science in Tsukuba (Japan) have recently probed a Chern mosaic topology and Berry-curvature magnetism in magic-angle graphene. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, offers new insight about topological disorder that can occur in condensed matter physical systems.

“Magic angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) has drawn a huge amount of interest over the past few years due to its experimentally accessible flat bands, creating a playground of highly correlated physics,” Matan Bocarsly, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org, “One such correlated phase observed in transport measurements is the quantum anomalous Hall effect, where topological edge currents are present even in the absence of an applied magnetic field.”

The quantum anomalous Hall effect is a charge transport-related phenomenon, in which a material’s Hall resistance is quantized to the so-called von Klitzing constant. It resembles the so-called integer quantum Hall effect, which Bocarsly and his colleagued had studied extensively in their previous works, particularly in graphene and MATBG.

Microplastics, tiny particles of plastic that are now found worldwide in the air, water, and soil, are increasingly recognized as a serious pollution threat, and have been found in the bloodstream of animals and people around the world.

Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer (left to right)

In 1911, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, in his quest to study materials at ever lower temperatures, happened to find that the electrical resistance of some metallic materials suddenly vanished at temperatures near absolute zero. He called the phenomenon superconductivity, and scientists soon found additional materials that exhibited this property.

But no one could completely explain how it worked. For the next few decades, many prominent physicists worked to develop a theory of the mechanism underlying superconductivity, but no one had much success, and some despaired of figuring it out. One such physicist, Felix Bloch, was quoted as proposing “Bloch’s theorem: Superconductivity is impossible.”

Scientists, designers and engineers across the space industry are working tirelessly to form innovative solutions for traveling to, living on and further understanding Mars.

Mars has long occupied our imagination as a site of wonder and possibility in film — from the high-tech invasion portrayed in The War of the Worlds to Andy Weir’s perhaps more accurate depiction The Martian.

Today, reality is closer than ever to the dreams of science fiction. As early as the 2030s, humans will be able to visit Earth’s planetary neighbor in the most ambitious aerospace mission yet.

Continue reading “The Advanced Materials That Can Help Take Us to Mars” »

A team of University of Kentucky researchers led by College of Engineering Professor Dibakar Bhattacharyya, Ph.D., and his Ph.D. student, Rollie Mills, have developed a medical face mask membrane that can capture and deactivate the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on contact.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Bhattacharyya, known to friends and colleagues as “DB,” along with collaborators across disciplines at UK set out to create the material. Their work was published in Communications Materials on May 24.

SARS-CoV-2 is covered in spike proteins, which allow the virus to enter host cells once in the body. The team developed a membrane that includes proteolytic enzymes that attach to the protein spikes and deactivates them.

Circa 2021

Mycelium is very light in weight, it naturally floats on water, it can withstand the cold of space where we don’t have to worry about cold welding, and we can add in fine strains of metal material which is used to transmit almost any type of signal. As you can see, there are numerous reasons why mycelium is quite suitable for our satellites in space, on land, and in the air on its way to space.

Continue reading “Mushrooms could solve a huge problem in outer space” »

The transport sector is transforming towards climate-friendly powertrains with significantly reduced CO₂ emissions. The electrification of powertrains remains a major challenge not only for trucks, buses, trains, and ships but also for aircraft. These applications cannot be realized in the future with batteries because of the energy requirements. The fuel cell is an extremely promising energy supplier for these applications, which supplies electrical energy from stored hydrogen and ambient air.

Fraunhofer Institutes LBF, IFAM, IISB, and SCAI joined their forces to develop advanced and highly efficient components for fuel cells. The project HABICHT aims to design and develop a high-speed motor for a fuel cell compressor to enable innovation in the utility vehicle and aviation domain. The electric machine should at least achieve apower density of 30 kW/kgby using innovative materials for direct cooling of the stator and maximizing the rotor’shigh-speed capability (150.000 rpm). The rotor design will use a new manufacturing process to glue and pot the magnets to be suitable for high circumferential speeds.

Prototype of a high-speed motor for a fuel cell compressor. (Image: Project HABICHT)

The solar material was launched from a snapping solar filament.

Physics World

To get around this problem, Kanté and colleagues utilized photonic crystals. These are periodic structures, which, like electronic semiconductors, have “band gaps” – frequencies at which they are opaque. Like graphene in electronics, photonic crystals generally contain Dirac cones in their band structures. At the vertex of such a cone is the Dirac point, where the band gap closes.