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Category: materials – Page 142

“When we put everything together, we saw drops in brightness that were not caused by Quaoar, but that pointed to the presence of material in a circular orbit around it,” said Bruno Morgado of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in a statement. “The moment we saw that we said, ‘Okay, we are seeing a ring around Quaoar.’”

Quaoar is part of a collection of about 3,000 dwarf planets known as trans-Neptunian objects, which are beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune.

Scientists are now wondering why the dense material in Quaoar’s ring has not come together to form a small moon, because the ring itself is “at a distance of almost seven and a half times the radius of Quaoar,” the ESA said.

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Despite decades of innovation in fabrics with high-tech thermal properties that keep marathon runners cool or alpine hikers warm, there has never been a material that changes its insulating properties in response to the environment. Until now.

University of Maryland researchers have created a that can automatically regulate the amount of heat that passes through it. When conditions are warm and moist, such as those near a sweating body, the fabric allows (heat) to pass through. When conditions become cooler and drier, the fabric reduces the heat that escapes. The development was reported in the February 8, 2019 issue of the journal Science.

The researchers created the fabric from specially engineered yarn coated with a conductive metal. Under hot, , the strands of yarn compact and activate the coating, which changes the way the fabric interacts with infrared . They refer to the action as “gating” of infrared radiation, which acts as a tunable blind to transmit or block heat.

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An asteroid mining startup called AstroForge is preparing to launch two missions to space this year, Bloomberg reports — inaugural, albeit early attempts to extract valuable resources from space rocks.

AstroForge isn’t looking to actually land on an asteroid and start extracting materials just yet. Its first mission to space, slated to launch aboard a SpaceX rideshare in April, will involve testing out ways of refining platinum from asteroid-like materials in space.

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Advanced new Faraday cages—the metal mesh enclosures that can block wireless signals—can also be switched on and off for reversible protection against noise, a new study finds.

In addition, these new shields can be easily fabricated through a technique akin to spray-painting, which could help them find use in electronics, researchers say.

Built out of a novel material called MXene, these cages could block and allow signals as desired.

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The world has witnessed many bizarre things, but seeing a biological body devoid of life become functional with the help of technology is a totally new tale. OSCAR, a living being formed from human cells, was born. Cornelis Vlasman is the protagonist, a talented biologist who believes that the path less trodden is, by definition, the least interesting. He creates his own laboratory with a few like-minded people, where he experiments with organic materials on his own initiative, with his own resources, and with his own crew.

After many years of hard labor, Vlasman’s team is successful in creating new life from cells collected from his own body. Under his guidance, OSCAR, the world’s first living organism, is being built. OSCAR is a human-sized prototype built with interactive organ modules created from human cells.

In a modular system, independent modules, similar to building blocks, constitute a transformable and thus changeable arrangement.

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Optical pulling is an attractive concept due to the counterintuitive feature, the profound mechanism underneath and promising applications. In recent ten years, optical pulling of micro-nano objects have been fully demonstrated. However, optical pulling of a macroscopic object is challenging. Herein, laser pulling of a macroscopic object is presented in rarefied gas. The pulling force is originated from the Kundsen force when a gauss laser beam irradiates a macroscopic structure composed of the absorptive bulk cross-linked graphene material and a SiO2 layer. A torsional pendulum device qualitatively presents the laser pulling phenomenon. A gravity pendulum device was used to further measure the pulling force that is more than three orders of magnitudes larger than the radiation pressure. This work expands the scope of optical pulling from microscale to macroscale and provides an effective technique approach for macroscopic optical manipulations.

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