Ahh, summer, a time of vacations at the beach or mountains—and sky-high electricity bills as your air conditioner labors against the heat and humidity.
But what is the optimal temperature setting for your air conditioner?
And how does your body adapt to heat?
Northeastern University’s Stefan Kautsch, a teaching professor in physics, explains heat transfer and how the concepts he discusses in the classroom can also help humans survive sweltering temperatures.
I’ve always been fascinated by how materials break down, especially glasses and polymers that don’t have a regular crystal structure. Unlike crystals, where we understand plasticity through things like dislocations, amorphous materials like glasses are messier. There’s no neat lattice to analyze, so figuring out where and how they deform under stress is a big open question.
In two dimensions, researchers, including my research group and myself, have started using a topological approach—looking at vortex-like patterns in how atoms move or vibrate—to identify weak spots in glasses. This also included slicing 3D glasses to find topological defects in the two-dimensional slices. That got me wondering: Could we do something similar in three dimensions, and, crucially, without having to slice the glass into 2D layers?
In this work published in Nature Communications, together with my postdoc Dr. Arabinda Bera, who performed the analysis, and with my longtime collaborator Prof. Matteo Baggioli, we show that we can. We use a kind of topological defect called a hedgehog, which is a point-like distortion in a vector field—like when tiny arrows in space all point outward or inward, just like the spines of a hedgehog. These kinds of defects are well-known in soft matter physics, particularly in liquid crystals, but we hadn’t seen them applied to 3D amorphous solids before.
The first results of the ETH Zurich and ANSTO collaboration focused on silicon carbide (SiC) devices have been reported in two publications.
Dr. Corinna Martinella, formerly a senior scientist at ETH Zurich, said in a LinkedIn post that the research advances an understanding of the basic mechanisms of radiation damage in SiC power devices exposed to heavy ions.
An article in IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science describes the testing of how commercial silicon carbide (SiC) power devices, including MOSFETs and Junction Barrier Schottky (JBS) diodes, respond to space-like radiation at a microscopic level.
Astronomers at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island have detected unexpected signals from a nearby star, revealing insights that challenge current ideas about stellar behavior.
Using the Keck Planet Finder (KPF), the observatory’s most advanced instrument, the team measured oscillations within the star, subtle vibrations once thought undetectable. The results, published in The Astrophysical Journal.
