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Blog – Page 1453

Kyushu University researchers have shed new light into a critical question on how baby stars develop. Using the ALMA radio telescope in Chile, the team found that in its infancy, the protostellar disk that surrounds a baby star discharges plumes of dust, gas, and electromagnetic energy.

These “sneezes,” as the researchers describe them, release the magnetic flux within the protostellar , and may be a vital part of star formation. Their findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Stars, including our sun, all develop from what are called , large concentrations of gas and that eventually condense to form a stellar core, a baby star. During this process, gas and dust form a ring around the baby star called the protostellar disk.

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Electrons—the infinitesimally small particles that are known to zip around atoms—continue to amaze scientists despite the more than a century that scientists have studied them. Now, physicists at Princeton University have pushed the boundaries of our understanding of these minute particles by visualizing, for the first time, direct evidence for what is known as the Wigner crystal—a strange kind of matter that is made entirely of electrons.

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For more than a decade, scientists have used bismuth (Bi)-based topological insulators to demonstrate and explore exotic quantum effects in bulk solids mostly by manufacturing compound materials, like mixing Bi with selenium (Se), for example. However, this experiment is the first time topological effects have been discovered in crystals made of the element As.

“The search and discovery of novel topological properties of matter have emerged as one of the most sought-after treasures in modern physics, both from a fundamental physics point of view and for finding potential applications in next-generation quantum science and engineering,” said Hasan. “The discovery of this new topological state made in an elemental solid was enabled by multiple innovative experimental advances and instrumentations in our lab at Princeton.”

An elemental solid serves as an invaluable experimental platform for testing various concepts of topology. Up until now, bismuth has been the only element that hosts a rich tapestry of topology, leading to two decades of intensive research activities. This is partly attributed to the material’s cleanliness and the ease of synthesis. However, the current discovery of even richer topological phenomena in arsenic will potentially pave the way for new and sustained research directions.

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Pulmonary diseases are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. For many progressive lung diseases like idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a key issue is a low supply of new stem cells to repair and reverse damage. These cells are responsible for regenerating and increasing the growth of healthy tissue—without them, lung function decreases and a range of severe illnesses can take hold.

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In conventional functional MRI (fMRI), researchers monitor changes in blood flow to different brain regions to estimate activity. But this response lags by at least one second behind the activity of neurons, which send messages in milliseconds.

Park and his co-authors said that DIANA could measure neuronal activity directly, which is an “extraordinary claim”, says Ben Inglis, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

The DIANA technique works by applying minor electric shocks every 200 milliseconds to an anaesthetized animal. Between shocks, an MRI scanner collects data from one tiny piece of the brain every 5 milliseconds. After the next shock, another spot is scanned. The software stitches together data from all the spots, to visualize changes in an entire slice of brain over a 200-millisecond period. The process is similar to filming an action pixel by pixel, where the action would need to be repeated to record every pixel, and those recordings stitched together, to create a full video.

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But a team of researchers has recently developed a novel —the use of chemical solutions to peel off thin layers from their parent compounds, creating atomically thin sheets—that looks set to deliver on the ultra-thin substance’s promise finally.

The researchers describe their fabrication technique in a study published in Nature.

In the world of ultra-thin or ‘two-dimensional’ materials—those containing just a single layer of atoms—transition metal telluride (TMT) nanosheets have, in recent years, caused great excitement among chemists and materials scientists for their particularly unusual properties.

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“We found to our great surprise that this substrate is very much active, jiving and responding in completely surprising ways as the film switches from an insulator to a metal and back when the electrical pulses arrive,” Gopalan said. “This is like watching the tail wagging the dog, which stumped us for a long while. This surprising and previously overlooked observation completely changes how we need to view this technology.”

To understand these findings, the theory and simulation effort — led by Long-Qing Chen, Hamer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, professor of engineering science and mechanics and of mathematics at Penn State — developed a theoretical framework to explain the entire process of the film and the substrate bulging instead of shrinking. When their model incorporated naturally occurring missing oxygen atoms in this material of two types, charged and uncharged, the experimental results could be satisfactorily explained.

“These neutral oxygen vacancies hold a charge of two electrons, which they can release when the material switches from an insulator to a metal,” Gopalan said. “The oxygen vacancy left behind is now charged and the crystal swells up, leading to the observed surprising bulging in the device. This response can also happen in the substrate. All of these physical processes are beautifully captured in the phase-field theory and modeling performed in this work for the first time by the postdoc Yin Shi in Prof. Chen’s group.”

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Study critiques the World Health Organization’s fungal priority pathogens list for not fully reflecting the global burden of fungal diseases, advocating for a revised list that considers regional disparities and elevates the priority of pathogens like Mucorales and Histoplasma spp. to better align with their impact on public health.

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