These robots have already proved popular in Europe and helped with extinguishing the Notre Dame fire in 2019.

Plant based fabric can help reduce exposure to oil based fabrics so there are less cancer risk with clothing. Washi is made many different ways but can be done even with paper pulp and also paper thread.

“The fabric is soft, resistant to water, and it is even washable,” said 61-year-old company president and granddaughter of the founder, Akemi Kawamura, describing the characteristics of washi jackets.

Japanese paper is cut thin and twisted into threads before being woven into fabrics with special machines. “It’s light and airy, so it’s warm in winter, but breathable and comfortable in the summer,” she said.

Some researchers and public health experts have also expressed concerns that microplastic exposure can lead to babies being born underweight.

Recent studies found that the average liter of store-bought bottled water contains more than 240,000 nanoplastics while the majority of meat and plant-based alternatives contain tiny plastics linked to cancer.

Scientists have cautioned that it will take time to transfer to creating the new material because existing manufacturing equipment was only built for traditional plastic.

The fashion world is buzzing about a new material that’s changing the game: mushroom leather. Made from mycelium, this innovative textile is taking the industry by storm, offering a sustainable and stylish alternative to traditional leather.

But it’s not just about looking good — this fungal fashion movement is about embracing a more eco-conscious and cruelty-free approach to clothing production.

What makes mushroom leather so remarkable? It all starts with mycelium, the thread-like, dense cellular structure that forms the vegetative part of a fungus.

For decades, scientists have used the Milky Way as a model for understanding how galaxies form. But three new studies raise questions about whether the Milky Way is truly representative of other galaxies in the universe.

“The Milky Way has been an incredible physics laboratory, including for the physics of galaxy formation and the physics of dark matter,” said Risa Wechsler, the Humanities and Sciences Professor and professor of physics in the School of Humanities and Sciences. “But the Milky Way is only one system and may not be typical of how other galaxies formed. That’s why it’s critical to find similar galaxies and compare them.”

To achieve that goal, Wechsler cofounded the Satellites Around Galactic Analogs (SAGA) Survey dedicated to comparing galaxies similar in mass to the Milky Way.

Using various telescopes, an international team of astronomers has conducted a comprehensive study of a double-lined spectroscopic binary known as HD 34736. The study, published November 6 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, delivers important insights into the properties of this system.

So far, the majority of binaries have been detected by Doppler shifts in their spectral lines, hence these systems are called spectroscopic binaries. Observations show that in some spectroscopic binaries, spectral lines from both stars are visible, and these lines are alternately double and single. These systems are known as double-lined spectroscopic binaries (SB2).

HD 34,736 is an SB2 system consisting of two chemically peculiar late B-type stars, located some 1,215 light years away. Previous observations of HD 34,736 have found that the system has an extraordinarily strong magnetic field exceeding 4.5 kG. The effective temperatures of the primary and secondary star were found to be 13,700 and 11,500 K, respectively.

Normally found only in heavy metal bands or certain post-apocalyptic films, a “flame-throwing guitar” has now been spotted moving through space. Astronomers have captured movies of this extreme cosmic object using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope.

The new movie of Chandra (red) and Palomar (blue) data helps break down what is playing out in the Guitar Nebula. X-rays from Chandra show a filament of energetic matter and antimatter particles, about two light-years or 12 trillion miles long, blasting away from the pulsar (seen as the bright white dot connected to the filament).

Astronomers have nicknamed the structure connected to the pulsar PSR B2224+65 as the “Guitar Nebula” because of its distinct resemblance to the instrument in glowing hydrogen light. The guitar shape comes from bubbles blown by particles ejected from the pulsar through a steady wind. Because the pulsar is moving from the lower right to the upper left, most of the bubbles were created in the past as the pulsar moved through a medium with variations in density.

Graphene, particularly in its purest form, has long been considered a promising material for developing spintronic devices. These devices leverage the intrinsic angular momentum (i.e., spin), as opposed to the charge, of electrons to transmit and process data.

A research team led by Dominik Schneble, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has uncovered a novel regime, or set of conditions within a system, for cooperative radiative phenomena, casting new light on a 70-year-old problem in quantum optics.

Their findings on previously unseen collective spontaneous emission effects, in an array of synthetic (artificial) atoms, are published in Nature Physics, accompanied by a theoretical paper in Physical Review Research.

Spontaneous emission is a phenomenon in which an excited atom falls to a lower-energy state and spontaneously emits a quantum of electromagnetic radiation in the form of a single photon. When a single excited atom decays and emits a photon, the probability of finding the atom in its excited state falls exponentially to zero as time progresses.

Over the past decades, psychologists and policymakers have been trying to devise interventions that could dissuade individuals from engaging in dishonest social behaviors, such as tax evasion or fraud. One promising strategy they identified entails asking people to commit to being honest before they are given the opportunity to engage in dishonest behavior.

While many studies found evidence suggesting that honesty oaths can reduce dishonest behavior, very few explored how different interventions utilizing these oaths compare. Researchers at Aarhus University and other institutes worldwide recently carried out a study investigating the effectiveness of various ex-ante honesty oath interventions.

Their findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that while different honesty oath-based interventions can successfully curb dishonesty, their effectiveness varies greatly depending on their content. The researchers also identified an intervention that appears to be particularly promising for reducing dishonest behavior.