Thin glass-polymer sheet increases passive radiative cooling.
A new metamaterial film provides cooling without needing a power input. Made out of glass microspher.
Following four years of top-secret research and development, the scientists of the Manhattan Project were ready to test their first nuclear weapon, a plutonium bomb code-named Trinity.
When the bomb detonated over the sands of New Mexico on July 16, 1945, the fireball heralded the arrival of the nuclear era. It also created something a little smaller: scattered lumps of knobbly green glass.
Trinitite is the mineral that formed from sand that liquefied during the intense heat of the Trinity test. Initially it was believed that trinitite was created when the heat of the fireball liquefied the sand on the ground. In 2005, however, Nuclear Weapons Journal published a study that contradicted that assumption. After conducting “macroscopic measurements and theoretical calculations of the blast” using trinitite samples “approximately the size of a small pancake,” Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist Robert Hermes and his colleagues concluded that the chunks of mineral were formed when sand got scooped up into the atomic fireball, liquefied in the heat, then fell back onto the hot sand on the ground to form glassy clusters.
This month, a collaboration between NASA and various research institutions pinpointed a “central biological hub” that controls health during space travel. The culprit is the cell’s energy factory, the mitochondria, which breaks down in function in a way eerily similar to aging. Like shutting down power and water in a city, disruptions to the mitochondria reverberate throughout the cells and organs, potentially leading to problems with sleeping, the immune system, and more in space. The results were [published in *Cell](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)31461-6).*
Human civilization wouldn’t be where it is today if we hadn’t domesticated animals to be either loyal and cuddly or dumb and tasty. Now, researchers in Australia have discovered what they claim is the very first example of an animal domesticating another animal – a fish species found to recruit tiny shrimp to help tend their algae farms.
It’s believed that humans first domesticated the wolf around 15,000 years ago to help us hunt, and later for companionship. Over the following millennia, we added goats, pigs, sheep and cattle for food and materials. And almost every plant we eat looks nothing like their original wild counterparts, having been honed for thousands of years at our hands to be bigger, hardier, tastier, more nutritious or easier to grow, harvest and eat.
So far, the only other organisms known to domesticate others have been insects – for example ants farm aphids, protecting them from predators in exchange for the sweet sticky goo they excrete. But the behavior has never been observed in other vertebrate species before.
Microsoft Health-Tech Vision
Dr. James Weinstein, is Senior Vice President, Microsoft Healthcare, where he is in charge of leading strategy, innovation and health equity functions.
If you want to live long enough to see a reversal of aging and everlasting youth, exercise should be at the core of your routine.
Here I look at ten amazing benefits that exercise brings to your body and mind, so if you haven’t already got a regime on the go, hopefully this will convince you to start now.
Continue reading “Why We Should Exercise Regularly — Ten Amazing Benefits” »
Fast spinning black holes could have features different from those predicted by general relativity.
General relativity is a profoundly complex mathematical theory, but its description of black holes is amazingly simple. A stable black hole can be described by just three properties: its mass, its electric charge, and its rotation or spin. Since black holes aren’t likely to have much charge, it really takes just two properties. If you know a black hole’s mass and spin, you know all there is to know about the black hole.
This property is often summarized by the no-hair theorem. Specifically, the theorem asserts that once matter falls into a black hole, the only characteristic that remains is mass. You could make a black hole out of a Sun’s worth of hydrogen, chairs, or those old copies of National Geographic from Grandma’s attic, and there would be no difference. Mass is mass as far as general relativity is concerned. In every case the event horizon of a black hole is perfectly smooth, with no extra features. As Jacob Bekenstein said, black holes have no hair.
Continue reading “Black Holes Gain new Powers When They Spin Fast Enough” »
Researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and Seoul National University in South Korea have demonstrated a new way to enhance the energy efficiency of a non-volatile magnetic memory device called SOT-MRAM. Published in Advanced Materials, this finding opens up a new window of exciting opportunities for future energy-efficient magnetic memories based on spintronics.
In modern computers, the random access memory (RAM) is used to store information. The SOT-MRAM (spin-orbit torque magnetic RAM) is one of the leading candidates for the next-generation memory technologies that aim to surpass the performance of various existing RAMs. The SOT-MRAM may operate faster than the fastest existing RAM (SRAM) and maintain information even after the electric energy supply is powered off whereas all fast RAMs existing today lose information as soon as the energy supply is powered off. The present level of the SOT-MRAM technology falls short of being satisfactory, however, due to its high energy demand; it requires large energy supply (or large current) to write information. Lowering the energy demand and enhancing the energy efficiency is an outstanding problem for the SOT-MRAM.
In the SOT-MRAM, magnetization directions of tiny magnets store information and writing amounts to change the magnetization directions to desired directions. The magnetization direction change is achieved by a special physics phenomenon called SOT that modifies the magnetization direction when a current is applied. To enhance the energy efficiency, soft magnets are ideal material choice for the tiny magnets since their magnetization directions can be easily alterned by a small current. Soft magnets are bad choice for the safe storage of information since their magnetization direction may be altered even when not intended—due to thermal noise or other noise. For this reason, most attempts to build the SOT-MRAM adopt hard magnets, because they magnetize very strongly and their magnetization direction is not easily altered by noise. But this material choice inevitably makes the energy efficiency of the SOT-MRAM poor.
