Lifeboat Foundation

This ‘smooth’ silicon wafer is actually covered in very tiny, virus-slaying needles.

Stanford materials engineers have 3D printed tens of thousands of hard-to-manufacture nanoparticles long predicted to yield promising new materials that change form in an instant.

New metamaterial revolutionizes sound wave amplification discovery:

Researchers have realized a new type of metamaterial through which sound waves flow in an unprecedented fashion.

Stanford materials engineers have 3D printed tens of thousands of hard-to-manufacture nanoparticles long predicted to yield promising new materials that change form in an instant.

Researchers at AMOLF, in collaboration with partners from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, have realized a new type of metamaterial through which sound waves flow in an unprecedented fashion. It provides a novel form of amplification of mechanical vibrations, which has the potential to improve sensor technology and information processing devices.

This 2D material is only the second to exhibit the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect, and theorists are still debating how it works.

“For the first time we have shown that even a tiny fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer onboard a spacecraft,” said Dr. Fabian Klenner.

How will we find life on Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, and Saturn’s icy moon, Enceladus? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigate how ice grains that are discharged from the active plumes of these small moons could possess enough organic material for life to exist. This study holds the potential to help astrobiologists develop the necessary instruments and methods to find life on these small moons, specifically with NASA’s Europa Clipper scheduled to launch this October, whose goal will be to investigate Europa’s habitability potential.

Artist’s illustration of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, seen here upside down as the plumes are on the south pole. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Continue reading “Exploring Extraterrestrial Oceans: Ice-Grains as Potential Carriers of Life” »

Weak fluctuations in superconductivity, a precursor phenomenon to superconductivity, have been successfully detected by a research group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech). This breakthrough was achieved by measuring the thermoelectric effect in superconductors over a wide range of magnetic fields and over a wide range of temperatures, from much higher than the superconducting transition temperature to very low temperatures near absolute zero. The results of this study were published online in Nature Communications on March 16, 2024.

This revealed the full picture of fluctuations in superconductivity with respect to temperature and magnetic field, and demonstrated that the origin of the anomalous metallic state in magnetic fields—which has been an unsolved problem in the field of two-dimensional superconductivity for 30 years—is the existence of a quantum critical point, where quantum fluctuations are at their strongest.

Electrons swarm in a soup of quantum entanglement in a new class of materials called strange metals.

By Douglas Natelson