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Blog – Page 2101

A team at HZB has developed a new measurement method that, for the first time, accurately detects tiny temperature differences in the range of 100 microKelvin in the thermal Hall effect. Previously, these temperature differences could not be measured quantitatively due to thermal noise.

Their study is published in Materials & Design.

Using the well-known terbium titanate as an example, the team demonstrated that the method delivers highly reliable results. The thermal Hall effect provides information about coherent multi-particle states in quantum materials based on their interaction with lattice vibrations (phonons).

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The type I CRISPR protein Cas3 works like Pac-Man, chomping away at a continuous stream of nucleotides with intrinsic activity for introducing targeted large deletions from a few hundred base pairs to as large as 200 kb. However, without the molecular equivalent to the four colored ghosts who chase and capture Pac-Man, the broad and unidirectional genome editing activity of Cas3 is essentially unregulated.

Yan Zhang, PhD, assistant professor in the department of biological chemistry at the University of Michigan Medical School, and her collaborators at Cornell University identified two anti-CRISPR proteins that can “turn off” Cas3, paving the way toward safer and better-controlled CRISPR applications.

The research article, “Exploiting activation and inactivation mechanisms in type I-C CRISPR-Cas3 for genome-editing applications,” was published in Molecular Cell.

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In a paradigm-shifting revelation, scientists at Heriot-Watt University have conducted experiments suggesting that two conflicting versions of reality can coexist simultaneously within the realm of quantum mechanics. This study challenges fundamental concepts in physics and raises questions about the existence of an objective reality.

The research delves into “Wigner’s friend,” a theoretical construct proposed by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner in 1961. This concept revolves around a photon existing in a superposition, where its polarization is both vertical and horizontal until measured. This theoretical dilemma becomes the focal point for the experimental exploration.

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A tragedy in the making.

How Lake Kivu became a ticking time bomb

Lake Kivu sits along the East African Rift Valley, dotted with hot springs that feed carbon dioxide and methane into its depths.

“Kivu has a complicated vertical structure,” Sergei Katsev, a limnologist at University of Minnesota Duluth, explains. While “the top [200 feet] or so mix regularly,” the rest of the lake remains stratified. Nearly 72 cubic miles of dissolved carbon dioxide and 14 cubic miles of methane, laced with toxic hydrogen sulfide, remain trapped in the bottom of the lake. They sit beneath a “main density gradient” at 850 feet below the surface.

Continue reading “This African lake may literally explode—and millions are at risk” | >

Experiments with small falling particles show that their orientations oscillate—which may help explain the settling of volcanic ash and the formation of snow.

Ice crystals and volcanic ash fall through the atmosphere in a complicated way that has been hard to capture experimentally. A new lab experiment has photographed the descent of nonspherical plastic particles that were fabricated to resemble natural particles [1]. The images reveal oscillations in the particles’ orientations as they flitter downward. The results could help in modeling the formation of snow and the transparency of clouds, which is important for weather and climate models.

In order to study how micrometer-sized particles fall in the atmosphere, researchers must address the challenge of zooming in on the particles as they pass quickly in front of the camera. “The problem is that your field of view is so small that you have a very limited chance to see the particle for a long trajectory,” says Gholamhossein Bagheri from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany. Previously, researchers tried to solve this problem by performing experiments in water with easier-to-view centimeter-sized particles. The water slows the particle motion, but the ratio of particle size to fluid viscosity—which can be characterized by the dimensionless Reynolds number—remains roughly the same for larger, waterborne particles as for smaller, airborne particles. This correspondence between the two situations implies that water-based experiments can offer information about the speed and orientation of falling particles in the atmosphere.

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Researchers have created a novel technology utilizing meta-optical devices for thermal imaging. This method offers more detailed information about the objects being imaged, potentially expanding thermal imaging applications in autonomous navigation, security, thermography, medical imaging, and remote sensing.

“Our method overcomes the challenges of traditional spectral thermal imagers, which are often bulky and delicate due to their reliance on large filter wheels or interferometers,” said research team leader Zubin Jacob from Purdue University. “We combined meta-optical devices and cutting-edge computational imaging algorithms to create a system that is both compact and robust while also having a large field of view.”

In Optica, Optica Publishing Group’s journal for high-impact research, the authors describe their new spectro-polarimetric decomposition system, which uses a stack of spinning metasurfaces to break down thermal light into its spectral and polarimetric components. This allows the imaging system to capture the spectral and polarization details of thermal radiation in addition to the intensity information that is acquired with traditional thermal imaging.

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