After coding, mathematics and chatbots, AI companies are setting their sights on the messy world of biology.
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Virtual modeling reveals safety measures for battery-powered mining systems
The mining industry is shifting toward battery-powered equipment to improve efficiency, but lithium-ion batteries pose risks due to their high energy density. They can fail, overheat and, in some cases, catch fire, releasing toxic emissions.
By combining three modeling approaches to build virtual mining systems, Penn State researchers now more comprehensively understand how to predict and mitigate lithium-ion battery fires in mines before they spread, endangering miners and halting operations.
Lung cancer: Can a new blood test warn of recurrence early on?
Now, a new blood test that detects traces of lung cancer DNA could help identify patients at risk of recurrence months before the disease becomes visible on scans. The findings may pave the way for more personalized follow-up care and treatment after surgery.
The study, published in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, suggests that liquid biopsies could eventually complement standard imaging and help doctors tailor follow-up care according to each patient’s risk of recurrence. However, further research is necessary to establish how best to use these tests in routine clinical practice and whether acting on their results improves long-term survival.
Ultrathin films that overcome ‘dead layer’ effect could enable energy-efficient microchips for AI
Multiferroics are a promising class of materials for making computer chips and other electronic components that can operate at much lower power than today’s devices. The materials have coupled electrical and magnetic properties that can be manipulated simultaneously with a relatively tiny electrical voltage.
Engineers are hopeful that multiferroics could help reduce the energy burden associated with the rise of AI, but there’s a problem known as the “dead layer” effect: When these materials are made thin enough to use in a computer chip, they lose the electrical and magnetic properties that make them so interesting.
Now, a team of Brown University researchers has developed a technique for making thin films of the multiferroic bismuth ferrite that retain their key properties and have some emergent properties that make them even more useful.
The nuclear waste repository in Finland designed to outlast modern civilisation
The first engineered structure built to last for 100,000 years is about to begin operations. The hope is that Onkalo, deep below ground in Finland, will offer a safe place for the country to store nuclear waste
Engineered optical layers reshape how ultrathin gold films break apart under laser light
Dewetting of thin films is a phenomenon in which heat or laser irradiation destabilizes a continuous film, causing it to retract into nanoscale island-like structures. Compared to thermal dewetting, laser-induced dewetting offers greater precision, speed and flexibility and is a promising approach for patterning metallic thin films.
In applications such as plasmonic color laser printing and fabrication of substrate-engraved metasurfaces, controlling the size and distribution of the resulting nanostructures remains a major challenge. In others, including low-emissivity window coatings and nanoscale plasmonic devices, dewetting is undesirable because it shortens coating lifetime and degrades device performance.
A new study published in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, explores a unique approach to control laser-induced dewetting.
Advanced Test Reactor
(ATR) is the world’s premier nuclear test reactor. It provides unmatched, national priority nuclear fuel and materials testing capabilities for military, federal, university and industry partners and customers.
INL’s nuclear research capabilities rely heavily on ATR, located at the ATR Complex on the INL Site, 47 miles west of Idaho Falls.
As the national laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE), INL serves a key role in U.S. nuclear energy research initiatives and programs, such as the National Reactor Innovation Center.
Images Capture Unusual Quantum Turbulence
Quantum fluids exhibit turbulence in ways both similar to and distinct from their classical counterparts. The most common shared feature is the flow of energy from large to small scales, transferred via vortices. Now Sebastian Morris of the University of Cambridge in the UK and his colleagues have observed a unique form of quantum turbulence that has no classical counterpart [1]. Their experiments in an ultracold gas provide direct evidence of so-called Vinen, or “ultraquantum,” turbulence—a random tangle of vortex rings that unravels without any energy transfer as the fluid settles into equilibrium.
Upon perturbation, quantum fluids such as superfluid helium and Bose-Einstein condensates can swirl around networks of thin vortex lines. Theorists have long predicted how these tangled vortices should unravel and decay while the fluid relaxes. Experimentalists have detected signs of this process in superfluid helium (but only indirectly) and in atomic gases (but only in 2D).
To obtain direct evidence of vortex dynamics in 3D, Morris and colleagues cooled ultracold potassium atoms in a cylindrical optical trap to just above absolute zero. Using a quantum-gas magnifier, they captured snapshots of the particle density in circular slices of the gas. These density maps revealed imprints of random vortex lines entering and exiting the slice. Imaging the gas as it relaxed yielded the fractional area covered by the vortex lines over time, constituting a direct measurement of the density of the tangles.
Probing Strangeness
The strange quark is significantly heavier than the up and down quarks and significantly lighter than the charm, top, and bottom quarks. Calculations within quantum chromodynamics (QCD) that are accurate at either end of the quark mass scale are less accurate for the in-between strange quark. To test their methods, theorists need data. Now the ALICE Collaboration has reported the results of studying interactions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) between charged kaons (K– and K+), which contain a strange quark and an up quark, and deuterons, which contain a proton and a neutron [1]. The measurements could help improve models of dense baryonic matter, including the interiors of neutron stars, where strange quarks are thought to abound.
In 2015 and 2018, the LHC smashed together lead ions at an energy of 5.02 tera-electron-volts per nucleon pair. Copious kaons are produced in such collisions, but the chances of a kaon and a harder-to-produce deuteron interacting are slim. Of the 337 million lead–lead collisions recorded by ALICE, only a few tens of thousands yielded close encounters between charged kaons and deuterons.
ALICE efficiently combed through those encounters for the even rarer ones in which a K– or K+ passed a deuteron (d) within a few femtometers and with a small relative momentum. At that separation, particles influence each other’s final state via the strong and Coulomb interactions. The ALICE researchers could measure the scattering lengths (a quantum generalization of cross section) for K– + d and K+ + d for the first time. Some models of the kaon–nucleon interaction exploit chirality, a useful approximation for up and down quarks, which are light. The new measurements will help establish the conditions under which those models reach their limits for the heavier strange quarks.
After 40 years of searching, physicists find evidence for an ultrarare particle decay
Physicists at CERN report that they’ve detected evidence of a rare meson particle decay (B⁰→ µ⁺µ⁻) that occurs when the meson’s beauty quark annihilates with a down-type quark. The pair decays into a muon and antimuon, which are particles similar to electrons. Because evidence for this decay helps test theoretical predictions from the Standard Model, physicists have been waiting for it since 1984, when it was first theorized.
The team details the measurements along with those of another slightly less rare decay in a recent paper posted to the arXiv preprint server.