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Researchers at RMIT University have found an innovative way to rapidly remove hazardous microplastics from water using magnets.

Lead researcher Professor Nicky Eshtiaghi said existing methods could take days to remove microplastics from water, while their cheap and sustainable invention achieves better results in just one hour.

The team says they have developed adsorbents, in the form of a powder, that remove microplastics 1,000 times smaller than those currently detectable by existing wastewater treatment plants.

Further studies of the meteorite are in peril, though.

A meteorite that fell in Somalia in 2020 is home to at least two minerals that are not found on our planet. The two minerals were identified by researchers at the University of Alberta, a press release said.

Large meteorites are rare but do occur, such as the one that fell near the town of El Ali in Somalia a couple of years ago. The celestial piece of rock weighs a massive 16.

Continue reading “Meteorite found in Somalia turns out to contain two minerals that are not found on Earth” »

A crystal’s shape is determined by its inherent chemistry, a characteristic that ultimately determines its final form from the most basic of details. But sometimes the lack of symmetry in a crystal makes the surface energies of its facets unknowable, confounding any theoretical prediction of its shape.

Theorists at Rice University say they’ve found a way around this conundrum by assigning arbitrary latent energies to its surfaces or, in the case of two-dimensional materials, its edges.

Yes, it seems like cheating, but in the same way a magician finds a select card in a deck by narrowing the possibilities, a little algebraic sleight-of-hand goes a long way to solve the problem of predicting a crystal’s shape.

UCLA researchers and their colleagues have discovered a new physics principle governing how heat transfers through materials, and the finding contradicts the conventional wisdom that heat always moves faster as pressure increases.

Up until now, the common belief has held true in recorded observations and scientific experiments involving different materials such as gases, liquids and solids.

The researchers detailed their discovery in a study published last week by Nature. They have found that boron arsenide, which has already been viewed as a highly promising material for heat management and advanced electronics, also has a unique property. After reaching an extremely high pressure that is hundreds of times greater than the pressure found at the bottom of the ocean, boron arsenide’s thermal conductivity actually begins to decrease.

As well as admiring beautiful pictures of space, you can also listen to those pictures via sonifications. These take images and translate them into eerie sounds to illustrate the wonderful and strange phenomena of our universe. NASA’s latest sonification illustrates the rings of X-rays that have been observed echoing around a black hole in the V404 Cygni system.

The sonification was made using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, both of which look in the X-ray wavelength. The data from the optical wavelength come from the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. Taken together, you can see how the X-ray bursts propagate outward from a central point which is the black hole. The black hole itself remains invisible, as it absorbs all light.

However, even though black holes are themselves invisible, the material around them can glow brightly. As material like dust and gas is attracted to the black hole due to gravity, it joins into a swirling disk around the black hole called an accretion disk. This material rubs together and creates heat due to friction, and can become so hot that it glows.

The Israeli government has teamed up with a defense contractor to invent a new material matrix that can hide soldiers from infrared sensors, making them more difficult to detect.

Polaris Defense’s Kit 300 system is a “thermal visual concealment” system that uses a combination of “metals, microfibres, and polymers” to mask a soldier’s thermal signature, according to Business Insider.

Thermal imaging technology creates a visual representation of an object via the invisible infrared (“heat radiation”) the object emits. If that object radiates heat, a thermal imager will show an image of it, with different colors representing relative levels of heat.

For something that emits no light that we can detect, black holes just love to cloak themselves in radiance.

Some of the brightest light in the Universe comes from supermassive black holes, in fact. Well, not actually the black holes themselves; it’s the material around them as they actively slurp down vast amounts of matter from their immediate surroundings.

Among the brightest of these maelstroms of swirling hot material are galaxies known as blazars. Not only do they glow with the heat of a swirling coat, but they also channel material into ‘blazing’ beams that zoom through the cosmos, shedding electromagnetic radiation at energies that are hard to fathom.

Researchers say structures made of the cells could potentially be used to clean up uranium from oceans, heal wounds, and more.

A recent study, affiliated with South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has reported a scalable synthetic strategy to fabricate low-resistance edge contacts to atomic transistors using a thermally stable 2D metal, namely PtTe₂.

Developing cheaper, smaller, and better-performing semiconductors with materials other than silicon (Si), is expected to gain momentum, thanks to a recent study from UNIST. This will aid in reducing the space between semiconductors and metals within semiconductor devices to ∼1 nm, which could help maintain high performance.

Published in the August 2022 issue of Nature Communications, this study has been jointly led by Professor Soon-Yong Kwon and Professor Zonghoon Lee in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST.