Don’t miss our analysis of Google’s I/O most important announcements and whether Google did enough to counter the momentum of OpenAI and Microsoft.
In case you were wondering how that gem of a concept from last year’s I/O was doing, here’s a clue.
In San Francisco, where two major companies are testing driverless taxis, some local officials are reporting that the vehicles have caused a number of issues, including rolling into fire scenes and running over hoses. NBC News’ Jake Ward reports.
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The robot can drive heavy steal beams into the ground at a rate of 1 per 73 seconds, which will help expedite solar farm construction.
It could be a strange way of achieving immortality—or at least, everlasting life for copies of you.
Researchers prove the fully nonclassical nature of a three-party quantum network, a requirement for developing secure quantum communication technologies.
Graphene’s valence and conduction bands meet at a point, making the single-layer crystal a semimetal. Researchers have predicted that spin-orbit coupling of carbon’s outer electrons opens a narrow gap between these bands—but only for the crystal’s bulk. Along the edges, spin-dependent states bridge the band gap, allowing the resistance-free flow of electrons: a quantum spin Hall effect. The weakness of carbon’s spin-orbit coupling means that this quantum spin Hall effect is too fragile to observe, however. Now Pantelis Bampoulis of the University of Twente in the Netherlands and his collaborators have seen the quantum spin Hall effect in graphene’s germanium (Ge) analog, germanene [1]. Furthermore, they show that germanene’s structure—a honeycomb like graphene’s, but lightly buckled—allows the quantum spin Hall effect to be turned off and on using an electric field.
Bampoulis and his collaborators grew a germanene monolayer on a buffer layer of Ge atop a substrate of Ge2Pt. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, they discriminated between the edge and the bulk states of germanene and measured how current depended on voltage under an external electric field perpendicular to the layer. At low field strengths, germanene exhibited a robust quantum spin Hall effect due to germanium’s strong spin-orbit coupling. At high field strengths, the edge states no longer bridged the gap and germanene became a normal insulator. But at a critical intermediate value, germanene underwent a topological phase transition as the otherwise separated conduction and valence bands in the bulk came together and the symmetry that sustained the quantum spin Hall effect was destroyed.
The robustness of germanene’s quantum spin Hall effect and the fact that it can be turned off with an applied electric field suggest that the material could be used to make room-temperature topological field-effect transistors.
A spinning plasma ring mimics the rotating structure surrounding a black hole.
Astrophysicists have many questions about the so-called accretion disk that forms from plasma and other matter falling into a black hole. Now researchers have generated a rotating ring of plasma in an unconfined arrangement in the lab, which will enable more realistic studies of plasma in astrophysical disks [1]. The lab plasma also produced a jet perpendicular to the disk, as real black holes do. The experiment could provide a platform for testing theories describing the evolution of astrophysical disks.
According to observations, the matter in a black hole accretion disk spirals inward at a rate that is thousands of times faster than would be expected from turbulence-free rotation. The leading explanation involves turbulence generated in part by the interaction of magnetic fields with the plasma in the disk, but this theory is difficult to test without a lab plasma that rotates rapidly. Such an experimental system would also allow researchers to investigate accretion disks around massive objects other than black holes.
In recent decades, engineers have created a wide range of robotic systems inspired by animals, including four legged robots, as well as systems inspired by snakes, insects, squid and fish. Studies exploring the interactions between these robots and their biological counterparts, however, as still relatively rare.
Researchers at Peking University and China Agricultural University recently set out to explore what happens when live fish are placed in the same environment as a robotic fish. Their findings, published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, could both inform the development of fish-inspired robots and shed some new light on the behavior of real fish.
“Our research team has been focusing on the development of self-propelled robotic fish for a considerable amount of time,” Dr. Junzhi Yu, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “During our field experiments, we observed an exciting phenomenon where live fish were observed following the swimming robotic fish. We are eager to further explore the underlying principles behind this phenomenon and gain a deeper understanding of this ‘fish following’ behavior.”
Scientists from Jilin University, the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research, and Skoltech have synthesized lanthanum-cerium polyhydride, a material that promises to facilitate studies of near-room-temperature superconductivity. It offers a compromise between the polyhydrides of lanthanum and cerium in terms of how much cooling and pressure it requires. This enables easier experiments, which might one day lead scientists to compounds that conduct electricity with zero resistance at ambient conditions—an engineering dream many years in the making. The study was published in Nature Communications.
One of the most intriguing unsolved questions in modern physics is: Can we make a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance (superconducts) at room temperature and atmospheric pressure? Such a superconductor would enable power grids with unprecedented efficiency, ultrafast microchips, and electromagnets so powerful they could levitate trains or control fusion reactors.
In their search, scientists are probing multiple classes of materials, slowly nudging up the temperature they superconduct at and decreasing the pressure they require to remain stable. One such group of materials is polyhydrides—compounds with extremely high hydrogen content. At −23°C, the current champion for high-temperature superconductivity is a lanthanum polyhydride with the formula LaH10. The trade-off: It requires the pressure of 1.5 million atmospheres. At the opposite end of the spectrum, cuprates are a class of materials that superconduct under normal atmospheric pressure but require cooler temperatures —no more than −140°.
