Lifeboat Foundation

A crystal’s shape is determined by its inherent chemistry, a characteristic that ultimately determines its final form from the most basic of details. But sometimes the lack of symmetry in a crystal makes the surface energies of its facets unknowable, confounding any theoretical prediction of its shape.

Theorists at Rice University say they’ve found a way around this conundrum by assigning arbitrary latent energies to its surfaces or, in the case of two-dimensional materials, its edges.

Yes, it seems like cheating, but in the same way a magician finds a select card in a deck by narrowing the possibilities, a little algebraic sleight-of-hand goes a long way to solve the problem of predicting a crystal’s shape.

UCLA researchers and their colleagues have discovered a new physics principle governing how heat transfers through materials, and the finding contradicts the conventional wisdom that heat always moves faster as pressure increases.

Up until now, the common belief has held true in recorded observations and scientific experiments involving different materials such as gases, liquids and solids.

The researchers detailed their discovery in a study published last week by Nature. They have found that boron arsenide, which has already been viewed as a highly promising material for heat management and advanced electronics, also has a unique property. After reaching an extremely high pressure that is hundreds of times greater than the pressure found at the bottom of the ocean, boron arsenide’s thermal conductivity actually begins to decrease.

As well as admiring beautiful pictures of space, you can also listen to those pictures via sonifications. These take images and translate them into eerie sounds to illustrate the wonderful and strange phenomena of our universe. NASA’s latest sonification illustrates the rings of X-rays that have been observed echoing around a black hole in the V404 Cygni system.

The sonification was made using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, both of which look in the X-ray wavelength. The data from the optical wavelength come from the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. Taken together, you can see how the X-ray bursts propagate outward from a central point which is the black hole. The black hole itself remains invisible, as it absorbs all light.

However, even though black holes are themselves invisible, the material around them can glow brightly. As material like dust and gas is attracted to the black hole due to gravity, it joins into a swirling disk around the black hole called an accretion disk. This material rubs together and creates heat due to friction, and can become so hot that it glows.

The Israeli government has teamed up with a defense contractor to invent a new material matrix that can hide soldiers from infrared sensors, making them more difficult to detect.

Polaris Defense’s Kit 300 system is a “thermal visual concealment” system that uses a combination of “metals, microfibres, and polymers” to mask a soldier’s thermal signature, according to Business Insider.

Thermal imaging technology creates a visual representation of an object via the invisible infrared (“heat radiation”) the object emits. If that object radiates heat, a thermal imager will show an image of it, with different colors representing relative levels of heat.

For something that emits no light that we can detect, black holes just love to cloak themselves in radiance.

Some of the brightest light in the Universe comes from supermassive black holes, in fact. Well, not actually the black holes themselves; it’s the material around them as they actively slurp down vast amounts of matter from their immediate surroundings.

Among the brightest of these maelstroms of swirling hot material are galaxies known as blazars. Not only do they glow with the heat of a swirling coat, but they also channel material into ‘blazing’ beams that zoom through the cosmos, shedding electromagnetic radiation at energies that are hard to fathom.

Researchers say structures made of the cells could potentially be used to clean up uranium from oceans, heal wounds, and more.

A recent study, affiliated with South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has reported a scalable synthetic strategy to fabricate low-resistance edge contacts to atomic transistors using a thermally stable 2D metal, namely PtTe₂.

Developing cheaper, smaller, and better-performing semiconductors with materials other than silicon (Si), is expected to gain momentum, thanks to a recent study from UNIST. This will aid in reducing the space between semiconductors and metals within semiconductor devices to ∼1 nm, which could help maintain high performance.

Published in the August 2022 issue of Nature Communications, this study has been jointly led by Professor Soon-Yong Kwon and Professor Zonghoon Lee in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST.

The new type of home could address housing shortages.

On Monday, the University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC) unveiled the first 3D-printed house made entirely out of bio-based materials called BioHome3D, according to a press release by the institution.

Fully recyclable and highly insulated

Continue reading “First ever 100 percent bio-based 3D-printed home unveiled” »

A team of scientists led by crystallographers from St Petersburg University has succeeded in synthesizing an analog of the Earth’s most structurally complex mineral, ewingite, in a laboratory. The findings of the research are published in Materials.

Ewingite is a mineral that was discovered in the mid-2010s in the abandoned Plavno uranium mine located in the Czech Republic. It is the most complex mineral known to exist on Earth. Moreover, because of the specific thermodynamic conditions required for its formation, the mineral is considered to be very rare.

The researchers managed to synthesize an analog with a composition and crystal structure similar to that of natural ewingite through a combination of low-temperature hydrothermal synthesis and room-temperature evaporation.