A tiny sample of the Moon locked away for more than 50 years turns out to have been hiding an astronomical secret.
In specks of troilite dust collected by Apollo 17 in 1972, scientists have found material that may be as old – or even older – than the Moon itself, a 4.5-billion-year-old relic of the early Solar System.
“My first thought was, ‘Holy shmolies, that can’t be right,’” says planetary scientist James Dottin of Brown University in the US.
Researchers used the MIRI instrument onboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to identify the presence of ultraviolet radiation in five young stars in the Ophiuchus region, and to understand its role in the formation of stars. The discovery of UV radiation around these protostars and its significant impact on the surrounding material is a challenge to models describing the formation of stars.
The paper is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, and the research team included Iason Skretas, a doctoral student at MPIfR, and Dr. Agata Karska (Center for Modern Inter-disciplinary Technologies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, and Max Planck Institute of Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), Bonn, Germany).
Energy that would normally go to waste inside powerful particle accelerators could be used to create valuable medical isotopes, scientists have found.
Researchers at the University of York have shown that intense radiation captured in particle accelerator “beam dumps” could be repurposed to produce materials used in cancer therapy. The study is published in the journal Physical Review C.
Scientists have now found a way to make those leftover photons do a second job, without affecting the main physics experiments.
Superconductive materials can conduct electricity with no resistance, but typically only at very low temperatures. Realizing superconductivity at room temperature could enable advanced, energy-efficient electronics and other technologies.
Now, an international research team is one step closer to such an achievement. The researchers made the first observation of a special electronic state known as a “nodal metal,” which provides more insight into electronic behavior at different temperatures, in a multilayer system comprising copper and oxygen.
The team, which includes researchers based in Japan, Taiwan and the United States, published their results in Nature Communications.
A new polymer could one day deliver insulin without needles. Researchers have designed a material that slips through skin and ferries insulin into the bloodstream.
Here’s how it works.
New material slips past skin and ferries insulin into the bloodstream by Ananya Palivela.
MIT engineers designed an ultrasonic system to “shake” water out of an atmospheric water harvester.
MIT researchers designed a device that quickly recovers drinking water from an atmospheric water harvesting material. The system uses ultrasonic waves to shake the water out of the material, recovering water in minutes.
A novel magnetic material with an extraordinary electronic structure might allow for the production of smaller and more efficient computer chips in the future: the p-wave magnet. Researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) were involved in its development.
The magnetic behavior in the interior of this material results from the way the electron spins arrange themselves—in the shape of a helix. Therefore, the electric current flowing through is deflected laterally. The results are published in Nature.
Magnetism, as we experience it every day, makes us usually think of materials such as iron, nickel, or cobalt that generate permanent magnetic fields or are attracted by magnetic forces. In these ferromagnetic materials, the spins, i.e. the moments of all electrons, move in the same direction.