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Category: materials – Page 31

Researchers have discovered clear chemical traces of decaying collagen in a duck-billed dinosaur fossil, upending previously held notions that any organic material found within such ancient fossils must be from some source of contamination.

“This research shows beyond doubt that organic biomolecules, such as proteins like collagen, appear to be present in some fossils,” says University of Liverpool materials scientist Steve Taylor.

“Our results have far-reaching implications. Firstly, it refutes the hypothesis that any organics found in fossils must result from contamination.”

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This new theoretical framework based on simulations allowed scientists to predict and design materials that exhibit almost no change in size with temperature.

With this new understanding, the team set out to create an even better material. And they succeeded.

Researchers developed a new alloy, the pyrochlore magnet, which exhibits even less thermal expansion than Invar.

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Most metals expand when their temperature rises. The Eiffel Tower, for example, is about 10 to 15 centimeters taller in summer than in winter due to its thermal expansion. However, this effect is extremely undesirable for many technical applications.

For this reason, scientists have long been searching for materials that always have the same length regardless of the temperature. Invar, for example, an alloy of iron and nickel, is known for its extremely low . How this property can be explained physically, however, was not entirely clear until now.

Now, a collaboration between theoretical researchers at TU Wien (Vienna) and experimentalists at University of Science and Technology Beijing has led to a decisive breakthrough.

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The electronics of the future can be made even smaller and more efficient by getting more memory cells to fit in less space. One way to achieve this is by adding the noble gas xenon when manufacturing digital memories.

This has been demonstrated by researchers at Linköping University in a study published in Nature Communications. This technology enables a more even material coating even in small cavities.

Twenty-five years ago, a camera memory card could hold 64 megabytes of information. Today, the same physical size memory card can hold 4 terabytes—over 60,000 times more information.

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“There are numerous challenges involved in developing a membrane that could ultimately be used as lightsail. It needs to withstand heat, hold its shape under pressure, and ride stably along the axis of a laser beam,” said Dr. Harry Atwater, who is a Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at Caltech and a co-author on the study. “But before we can begin building such a sail, we need to understand how the materials respond to radiation pressure from lasers. We wanted to know if we could determine the force being exerted on a membrane just by measuring its movements. It turns out we can.”

For the study, the researchers used real-life models to simulate the size of the lightsail, amount of laser power needed to propel the lightsail, and amount of pressure exerted on the lightsail to achieve the desired speed. After creating their own miniature lightsail measuring 40 microns long, 40 microns wide, and 50 nanometers thick tethered to four strings, the team subjected it to laser light to measure the amount of radiation pressure the lightsail was experiencing. In the end, the team found the specific angle and amount of force required to push the lightsail forward. Through this, they successfully established groundwork for potentially constructing larger lightsails in the future.

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Scientists improved enzyme-based biosensors by modifying MOFsMetal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are a new class of porous material compounds consisting of metal-to-organic ligand interactions. MOFs show promise to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of practical gas separation systems and are of interest for the storage of gases such as hydrogen and carbon dioxide. tabindex=0 MOFs to enhance electron transfer and enzyme stability.

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An exploration of 10 Mind Blowing Recent Space Discoveries.

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“The Puzzle of Meteoritic Minerals Heideite and Brezinaite; Are they Iron-based Superconductors? Are they Technosignatures?” B. P. Embaid, 2022.

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In our group we are researching the new materials and protocols needed for quantum communication, quantum computation and quantum sensing. The systems we use are rare earth ion crystals as they are a particularly promising candidates for building quantum information devices due to their excellent quantum coherence properties. This is crucial requirement to avoid the loss of quantum information through interactions with the local environment.

In our research we combine fundamental knowledge of the materials with the development of new quantum information protocols and device fabrication capabilities. This unique skillset has enabled us to achieve several key milestones in the field of quantum information processing, for example.

Research of the laser physics centre.

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