In recent years, there has been growing concern over the H5N1 influenza virus. It was first identified in birds three decades ago and has now gradually found its way to humans. H5N1 is a strain of the influenza virus harboring type 5 hemagglutinin (H5) and type 1 neuraminidase (N1) surface proteins, which help in viral entry and spread, respectively.
In the quest for energy independence, researchers have studied solar thermoelectric generators (STEGs) as a promising source of solar electricity generation. Unlike the photovoltaics currently used in most solar panels, STEGs can harness all kinds of thermal energy in addition to sunlight. The simple devices have hot and cold sides with semiconductor materials in between, and the difference in temperature between the sides generates electricity through a physical phenomenon known as the Seebeck effect.
But current STEGs have major efficiency limitations preventing them from being more widely adopted as a practical form of energy production. Right now, most solar thermoelectric generators convert less than 1% of sunlight into electricity, compared to roughly 20% for residential solar panel systems.
That gap in efficiency has been dramatically reduced through new techniques developed by researchers at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics.
Researchers with the schools of science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) are exploring new ways to manipulate matter with light to unlock a new generation of computer chips, photovoltaic cells and other advanced materials.
Physics professor Moussa N’Gom, Ph.D., and materials science professor Edwin Fohtung, Ph.D., have brought together their respective areas of expertise—optics and materials science —to illuminate previously unknown properties of the materials that will build the next generation of consumer, industrial and scientific devices.
“We can use almost the entire spectrum of light, from visible to X-ray, to manipulate and study materials,” Fohtung said. “We can interrogate any system, from hard condensed matter to soft biological tissue.”
Animals like bats, whales and insects have long used acoustic signals for communication and navigation. Now, an international team of scientists has taken a page from nature’s playbook to model micro-sized robots that use sound waves to coordinate into large swarms that exhibit intelligent-like behavior.
The robot groups could one day carry out complex tasks like exploring disaster zones, cleaning up pollution, or performing medical treatments from inside the body, according to team lead Igor Aronson, Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Mathematics at Penn State.
“Picture swarms of bees or midges,” Aronson said. “They move, that creates sound, and the sound keeps them cohesive, many individuals acting as one.”
Plan a route, grab some snacks, and fuel up. Engineers and scientists have been sending massive magnets from U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national labs on cross-country road trips.
Magnets are at the heart of many scientific instruments at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. They are not like typical refrigerator magnets, which apply a relatively weak and uniform force to magnetic materials. These electromagnets are often incredibly large and powerful, with variable fields that can be controlled by changing the electric current that runs through them.
One of their applications is to apply magnetic force to subatomic particles. For example, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is made of superconducting electromagnets that steer and focus particle beams as they circulate through the accelerator at nearly the speed of light.
Medical imaging methods such as ultrasound and MRI are often affected by background noise, which can introduce blurring and obscure fine anatomical details in the images. For clinicians who depend on medical images, background noise is a fundamental problem in making accurate diagnoses.
Methods for denoising have been developed with some success, but they struggle with the complexity of noise patterns in medical images and require manual tuning of parameters, adding complexity to the denoising process.
To solve the denoising problem, some researchers have drawn inspiration from quantum mechanics, which describes how matter and energy behave at the atomic scale. Their studies draw an analogy between how particles vibrate and how pixel intensity spreads out in images and causes noise. Until now, none of these attempts directly applied the full-scale mathematics of quantum mechanics to image denoising.
A research team from the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has shed new light on the magnetic reconnection process driven by rapidly expanding plasma, using magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) numerical simulations. Their findings, published recently in Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, reveal previously unobserved fine structures and physical mechanisms underlying this fundamental phenomenon.
Magnetic reconnection—a process where magnetic field lines break and rejoin, releasing massive energy—is critical to understanding explosive events in plasmas, from laboratory experiments to solar flares and space weather.
The team focused on how this process unfolds under rapid driving conditions, examining three distinct reconnection modes: flux pile-up, Sonnerup, and hybrid. These modes, they found, arise from variations in gas pressure and magnetic field strength within the inflow region, where plasma is drawn into the reconnection site.
Scientists have unveiled a new biodegradable plastic that vanishes in one of the harshest environments on Earth—the deep sea.
In an experiment nearly 3,000 feet underwater, a bioengineered material called LAHB broke down while conventional plastics stayed intact. Deep-sea microbes not only colonized the plastic’s surface, but actively digested it using specialized enzymes, turning it into harmless byproducts. This breakthrough suggests a promising solution to the global plastic crisis, especially in oceans where most waste lingers for decades or centuries.
Global plastic waste problem still looms.
