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Blog – Page 22

Bike locks or lightweight armour that cannot be cut by any tool, even angle grinders or high-pressure water jets, sound like an unattainable dream.

They could be remarkably close, however, thanks to a new ‘non-cuttable’ material developed by engineers at Durham University and the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany.

Researchers took inspiration from shells to create the strong and lightweight material, named Proteus after the shape-changing mythical god. Another unusual inspiration was grapefruit, which have very high impact resistance – when dropped from a height, for example – with very lightweight peel.

The material resists cutting by turning the force of a cutting tool back on itself. It is made of ceramic spheres encased in a cellular aluminium structure, similar to the organic tiles interlinked by biopolymers in abalone sea creatures.

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In a study published in Neuron, a research team led by Prof. Wang Liping from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed the neural circuit underlying individual differences in visual escape habituation.

Emotional responses, such as fear behaviors, are evolutionarily conserved mechanisms that enable organisms to detect and avoid danger, ensuring survival. Since Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” (1859) proposed that individual differences drive natural selection, understanding behavioral adaptation has become essential for unraveling biodiversity and survival strategies.

Repeated exposure to predators can elicit divergent coping strategies—habituation or sensitization—that are dependent on , internal physiological states, and prior experiences. However, the neural circuits underlying individual variability in the regulation of internal states and habituation to repeated threats remain poorly understood.

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Coherently controlling the motion of single atoms in optical tweezers would enable new applications in quantum information science. To demonstrate this, we first prepared atoms in their motional ground state using a species-agnostic cooling mechanism…

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A US startup is looking to our closest satellite to fill a resources gap here on Earth. Helium-3 is rare on terra firma, but is thought to be abundant in the regolith of the Moon. Interlune has now revealed a full-scale excavator prototype that forms a key component of its lunar Harvester.

The shortage of helium-3 – a stable isotope of helium important for applications ranging from energy production to medical research – was first identified in the US toward the middle of 2008. The US government officially recognized the issue in early 2009, and mitigation efforts put in place.

“The United States supply of 3He comes from the decay of tritium (3H), which the Nation had in large quantities because of our nuclear weapons complex; however, the tritium stockpile has declined in recent years through radioactive decay and is expected to decline in the future because of reduced demand for tritium,” read the intro to a National Isotope Development Center newsletter from 2014.

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A groundbreaking fuel cell could be the key to unlocking electric planes, according to a new study.

The researchers suggest that these devices could hold three times as much energy per kg compared to today’s top-performing EV batteries, providing a lightweight solution for powering not just planes, but lorries and ships too.

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