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A proposed technique would use light and nanowires to generate electron beams with nearly pure spin polarization.

In a polarized electron beam, the particles’ spins are not randomly oriented but favor a particular direction. The polarization serves as a useful property for studying the magnetism of materials or for probing the spins of atoms or nuclei. But such a beam typically has a low degree of polarization unless it is produced at a synchrotron facility. Theorists have proposed creating these beams using laser light, but so far these approaches have involved extremely intense lasers and have not been expected to produce high polarization. Now Deng Pan of East China Normal University and Hongxing Xu of Wuhan University, China, have proposed a method that reduces the required laser intensity by up to 10 billion times compared with previous laser-based approaches and that should produce a pair of beams that are nearly 100% polarized [1].

In Pan and Xu’s proposal, a wide laser beam broadsides an array of parallel conducting nanowires with 100-nm spacing and excites them to emit electromagnetic waves. An unpolarized electron beam is sent across the array, perpendicular to the wires, about 100 nm away from them. Some electrons absorb or emit photons, causing their spins to align parallel or antiparallel to the local electric field. They also gain or lose a photon’s worth of energy. This interaction with the radiation near the wires generates two new beams with nearly pure spin polarizations and slightly different energies, allowing them to be easily separated. Pan and Xu say that the technique should be implementable with current technology and that it may even lead to new ways of manipulating electrons.

The current work springs from a 2007 study in which Cavalleri and his team reported using terahertz laser pulses to distort a lattice into favoring a particular ground state [2]. The pulses excited specific, quantized vibrations—phonons—that changed the electronic state of a crystal, yielding a transient drop in electrical resistance of 5 orders of magnitude.

In their new experiment, the researchers selected three laser frequencies that were separately coupled to one of several possible lattice distortions in YTiO₃. Using a magneto-optical pump-probe setup, they examined how each of the excitations affected the crystal’s structure and its magnetism. Specifically, they observed whether the polarization of the light reflected by the crystal changed when viewed in opposite directions. A clockwise–counterclockwise shift in the polarization of the reflected light would be a sure sign of time-reversal invariance, which happens only in the presence of magnetic order.

They found that ultrafast laser pulses tuned to a phonon frequency of 9 THz caused the YTiO₃ crystal to fully magnetize just above zero K. They then showed that this order, instead of vanishing at 27 K, remained stable up to at least 80 K, the highest temperature that they measured. What’s more, the magnetism persisted for many nanoseconds, 6 orders of magnitude longer than the femtoseconds-long laser pulses. The team attribute this long-lasting state to the stability of the structural distortions induced by energy deposited by the laser.

Vertical Takeoff Vehicles, and other tech like electric cars are older than you think This one is from the 50’s.

Here are a series of videos that are mainly played in our gallery alongside exhibits, but we wanted patrons unable to visit the museum on a regular basis the chance to access them at a moment’s notice. Enjoy!

Years after shutting down its robotics division, OpenAI is now back in the game after raising funding for Norwegian robotics company 1X.

Learn about the causes, symptoms, diagnosis & treatment from the MSD Manuals — Medical Consumer Version.

Google is using its enormous Chrome browser testing base to help examine the prospect of continuing the security of the digital age into the uncertainty of the quantum one.

Proteins are made from chains of amino acids that fold into three-dimensional shapes, which in turn dictate protein function. Those shapes evolved over billions of years and are varied and complex, but also limited in number. With a better understanding of how existing proteins fold, researchers have begun to design folding patterns not produced in nature.

But a major challenge, says Kim, has been to imagine folds that are both possible and functional. “It’s been very hard to predict which folds will be real and work in a protein structure,” says Kim, who is also a professor in the departments of molecular genetics and computer science at U of T. “By combining biophysics-based representations of protein structure with diffusion methods from the image generation space, we can begin to address this problem.”

The new system, which the researchers call ProteinSGM, draws from a large set of image-like representations of existing proteins that encode their structure accurately. The researchers feed these images into a generative diffusion model, which gradually adds noise until each image becomes all noise. The model tracks how the images become noisier and then runs the process in reverse, learning how to transform random pixels into clear images that correspond to fully novel proteins.

In a study of 17 people from five families, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they found that ultra-lengthy DNA endcaps called telomeres fail to provide the longevity presumed for such people. Instead, people with long telomeres tend to develop a range of benign and cancerous tumors, as well as the age-related blood condition clonal hematopoiesis.

Reporting in the May 4 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins researchers say clonal hematopoiesis is common among this long-telomere group, and the blood condition combined with long telomeres may help mutations stick around longer in blood cells.

“Our findings challenge the idea that long telomeres protect against aging,” says Mary Armanios, M.D., professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, and professor of genetic medicine, molecular biology and genetics, and pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Rather than long telomeres protecting against aging, long telomeres allowed cells with mutations that arise with aging to be more durable.”

The immune system has a biological telecommunications system—small proteins known as interleukins that send signals among the leukocyte white blood cells to control their defense against infections or nascent cancer. Interleukin-6, or IL-6, is one of these key mediators of inflammation, and it can, as needed, provoke the immune system into attack against pathogens.

However, imbalances of IL-6—too much or too little—can cause disease, even in the absence of infection. Excess IL-6 is central to the pathogenesis of inflammatory reactions like rheumatoid disease and cytokine storms, while mutations that interrupt IL-6 signaling are also harmful, causing allergic disorders known as atopy that affect the skin, airways or body, including atopic dermatitis, allergic airway inflammation and hyper-IgE Syndrome, or HIES.

Loss of IL-6 signaling was known to cause an increase in inflammatory T helper 2, or Th2, cells. T helper cells act like generals, ordering other immune cells into action. Now, an unrecognized mechanism of how interrupted IL-6 signaling creates Th2 bias, as well as the specific role of IL-6 signaling in that process, has been described by Beatriz Léon, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Their study is published in Cellular & Molecular Immunology.