Lifeboat Foundation

Astronomers from the University of Warwick reveal a new phenomenon dubbed the “rocking shadow” effect that describes how disks in forming planetary systems are oriented, and how they move around their host star. The effect also gives clues as to how they might evolve with time. Dr. Rebecca Nealon presented the new work this week at the 2022 National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Warwick.

Stars are born when a large cloud of gas and dust collapses in on itself. The leftover material that doesn’t make it into the star ends up circling around it, not unlike how water swirls around the drain before falling in. This swirling mass of gas and dust is called a protoplanetary disk, and it’s where planets like the Earth are born.

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Moore’s law has driven the semiconductor industry to continue downscaling the critical size of transistors to improve device density. At the beginning of this century, traditional scaling started to encounter bottlenecks. The industry has successively developed strained Si/Ge, high-K/metal gate, and Fin-FETs, enabling Moore’s Law to continue.

Now, the critical size of FETs is down to 7 nm, which means there are almost 7 billion transistors per square centimeter on one chip, which brings huge challenges for fin-type structure and nanomanufacturing methods. Up to now, extreme ultraviolet lithography has been used in some critical steps, and it is facing alignment precision and high costs for high-volume manufacturing.

Meanwhile, the introduction of new materials and 3D complex structures brings serious challenges for top-down methods. Newly developed bottom-up manufacturing serves as a good complementary method and provides technical driving force for nanomanufacturing.

“NGS experts believe these materials were applied ahead of an exhibition in the early twentieth century,” the organization said in a press release. “Van Gogh often re-used canvases to save money. However, instead of painting over earlier works, he would turn the canvas around and work on the reverse.”

The portrait shows “a bearded sitter in a brimmed hat with a neckerchief loosely tied at the throat,” NGS says. The portrait has an intense stare, and the right side of his face is in shadow, while his left ear is clearly visible.

Unlike much outdoor infrastructure, roads are not designed with any sun protection, making them prone to cracking and potentially unsafe to drive on.

Now, RMIT University engineers collaborated with Tyre Stewardship Australia (TSA) to discover the perfect blend that is both UV resistant and withstands traffic loads, with the potential to save governments millions on road maintenance annually. Their new research has found that crumb rubber, which is recycled from scrap tires, acts like sunscreen for roads and halves the rate of sun damage when mixed with bitumen.

Crumb rubber has already shown promise in making concrete stronger and more heat resistant. The new study found that the material acts so effectively as a sunscreen for roads that it actually makes the surface last twice as long as regular bitumen.

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) researchers and their collaborators at home and abroad have successfully demonstrated a new platform for guiding the compressed light waves in very thin van der Waals crystals. Their method to guide the mid-infrared light with minimal loss will provide a breakthrough for the practical applications of ultra-thin dielectric crystals in next-generation optoelectronic devices based on strong light-matter interactions at the nanoscale.

Phonon-polaritons are collective oscillations of ions in polar dielectrics coupled to electromagnetic waves of light, whose electromagnetic field is much more compressed compared to the light wavelength. Recently, it was demonstrated that the phonon-polaritons in thin van der Waals crystals can be compressed even further when the material is placed on top of a highly conductive metal. In such a configuration, charges in the polaritonic crystal are “reflected” in the metal, and their coupling with light results in a new type of polariton waves called the image phonon-polaritons. Highly compressed image modes provide strong light-matter interactions, but are very sensitive to the substrate roughness, which hinders their practical application.

Challenged by these limitations, four research groups combined their efforts to develop a unique experimental platform using advanced fabrication and measurement methods. Their findings were published in Science Advances on July 13.

How did the Arava, a punishingly hot and arid desert, become one of Israel’s breadbaskets? It’s a story of determination and thinking outside the box.

The discovery could inform the design of practical superconducting devices. When it comes to graphene, it appears that superconductivity runs in the family. Graphene is a single-atom-thin 2D material that can be produced by exfoliation from the same graphite that is found in pencil lead. The u.

While many artificial materials have advanced properties, they have a long way to go to combine the versatility and functionality of living materials that can adapt to their situation. For example, in the human body bone and muscle continuously reorganise their structure and composition to better sustain changing weight and level of activity.

Now, researchers from Imperial College London and University College London have demonstrated the first spontaneously self-organising laser device, which can reconfigure when conditions change.

The innovation, reported in Nature Physics (“Self-organized Lasers of Reconfigurable Colloidal Assemblies”), will help enable the development of smart photonic materials capable of better mimicking properties of biological matter, such as responsiveness, adaptation, self-healing, and collective behaviour.

Nematodes, a specific sort of microscopic worm, have been proven by Osaka University researchers to be capable of killing cancer cells, according to Interesting Engineering and SciTechDaily.

The study titled “Nematode surface functionalization with hydrogel sheaths tailored in situ” by Wildan Mubarok, Masaki Nakahata, Masaru Kojima and Shinji Sakai showed that Hydrogel-based “sheaths” that can be further modified to transport useful cargo (cancer-killing substances) could be applied to these worms as a coating.

In 2019, astronomers observed the nearest example to date of a star that was shredded, or “spaghettified,” after approaching too close to a massive black hole.

That tidal disruption of a sun-like star by a black hole 1 million times more massive than itself took place 215 million light years from Earth. Luckily, this was the first such event bright enough that astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, could study the optical light from the stellar death, specifically the light’s polarization, to learn more about what happened after the star was torn apart.

Their observations on Oct. 8, 2019, suggest that a lot of the star’s material was blown away at high speed—up to 10,000 kilometers per second—and formed a spherical cloud of gas that blocked most of the high-energy emissions produced as the black hole gobbled up the remainder of the star.