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MIT has created this new aerogel which can produce large amounts of heat just from sunlight and could heat buildings free of electricity and fossil fuels.

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Once tooth enamel breaks or wears away it’s over – it doesn’t grow back. That’s why dentists have to plug in the gaps with artificial fillings. But now, a team of scientists from China’s Zhejiang University and Jiujiang Research Institute says it has finally figured out how to regrow tooth enamel, a development that could totally upend dental care. The team developed a gel that has been found to help mouse teeth regrow enamel within 48 hours. The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

What exactly is enamel and why can’t it regrow? It is a mineralized substance with a highly complicated structure that covers the surface of teeth. The structure is made up of enamel rods interwoven with inter-rods in a fish scale pattern which makes it the hardest tissue in the human body. It is initially formed biologically but once mature it becomes acellular, meaning it becomes devoid of the ability to self-repair. This is why cavities (tooth decay) are one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in humans.

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These water-filled headphones will bring new meaning to ‘soundwaves.’

China is building a supersonic train.

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The makers of this Star Trek-looking device say it can help you lose weight without diet or exercise.

A team of researchers at Laroche Laboratory, Université Paris Diderot and Université de Lyon has recently collected the first measurements of the resonance frequencies of a stable torus of fluid. The method they used to collect these observations, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could enable the modeling of a variety of large-scale structures that transiently arise in vortex rings.

Vortex rings are torus-shaped vortexes that can appear in both liquids and gases in a variety of settings. In nature, there are several examples of these vortex rings, including underwater bubble rings produced by divers or dolphins, smoke rings, and blood rings in the human heart.

“Although it has been shown that the dynamics of a vortex ring are dominated by large-scale structures at its periphery, the mechanisms governing their appearance are not well understood, reflecting to a large extent the experimental difficulties in generating a stable liquid torus under well-controlled conditions,” Eric Falcon, one of the researchers who carried out the recent study, told Phys.org. “It is in this context that we wanted to make a fluid ring stable.”

A team of researchers from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that they could use an optical tweezer array of laser-cooled molecules to observe ground state collisions between individual molecules. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their work with cooled calcium monofluoride molecules trapped by optical tweezers, and what they learned from their experiments. Svetlana Kotochigova, with Temple University, has published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining the work—she also gives an overview of the work being done with arrays of optical tweezers to better understand molecules in general.

As Kotochigova notes, the development of optical tweezers in the 1970s has led to groundbreaking science because it allows for studying atoms and molecules at an unprecedented level of detail. Their work involves using laser light to create a force that can hold extremely tiny objects in place as they are being studied. In more recent times, optical tweezers have grown in sophistication—they can now be used to manipulate arrays of molecules, which allows researchers to see what happens when they interact under very controlled conditions. As the researchers note, such arrays are typically chilled to keep their activity at a minimum as the molecules are being studied. In this new effort, the researchers chose to study arrays of cooled calcium monofluoride molecules because they have what the team describes as nearly diagonal Franck-Condon factors, which means they can be electronically excited by firing a laser at them, and then revert to an initial state after emission.

In their work, the researchers created arrays of tweezers by diffracting a single beam into many smaller beams, each of which could be rearranged to suit their purposes in real time. In the initial state, an unknown number of molecules were trapped in the array. The team then used light to force collisions between the molecules, pushing some of them out of the array until they had the desired number in each tweezer. They report that in instances where there were just two molecules present, they were able to observe natural ultracold collisions—allowing a clear view of the action.