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Several screening tests for cervical cancer have been developed in recent years. One technique uses immunofluorescent staining to determine the levels of biomarkers to indicate a cell is undergoing HPV-related cancerous growth. Immunostaining for these proteins, however, can be time-intensive. One new approach, discussed in this week’s Biomicrofluidics, looks to provide a way to screen cervical cells with immunostaining more efficiently, drawing inspiration from an unlikely source: Pachinko.

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Pathology labs mounted on chips are set to revolutionize the detection and treatment of cancer by using devices as thin as a human hair to analyze bodily fluids. The technology, known as microfluidics, promises portable, cheap devices that could enable widespread screening for early signs of cancer and help to develop personalized treatments for patients, said Ciprian Iliescu, a co-author of a review of microfluidic methods for cancer analysis published in the journal Biomicrofluidics.

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Diamond is one of the only materials hard and tough enough for the job of constant grinding without significant wear, but as any imminent proposee knows, diamonds are pricey. High costs drive the search for new hard and superhard materials. However, the experimental trial-and-error search is itself expensive. A simple and reliable way to predict new material properties is needed to facilitate modern technology development. Using a computational algorithm, Russian theorists have published a predictive tool in the Journal of Applied Physics.

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Imagine powering your devices by walking. With technology recently developed by researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and described in Applied Physics Letters, that possibility might not be far out of reach. An energy harvester is attached to the wearer’s knee and can generate 1.6 microwatts of power while the wearer walks without any increase in effort. The energy is enough to power small electronics like health monitoring equipment and GPS devices.

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Floating air particles following disasters and other geological events can have a lasting impact on life on Earth, and a new model drawing on chaos theory looks to help predict how these particles move, with an eye toward applications for geoengineering. Using available wind data, Tímea Haszpra developed a model for following particles as they travel around the globe. Using it, she has generated maps that can be used to predict how particles will be dispersed above the world.

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Microfluidics and learning-on-a-chip research -- involving the manipulation of small amounts of fluids to run miniaturized experiments -- are a prolific research field. But there aren’t yet many published examples of how to teach it in an easily understandable way or how to communicate advances within the field to the public. In Biomicrofluidics, researchers present a review of published literature about microfluidics education and provide methods and suggestions for anyone who wants to improve their own microfluidics teachings and outreach.

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A new mathematical model of the structure of networks could help find new cancer drugs, speed up traffic flow and combat sexually transmitted disease. Although the three challenges seem diverse, they all could benefit from a theory that helps uncover information about a network by analyzing its structure. The study was published in the journal Chaos. Successful link prediction algorithms already exist for certain types of networks, but the researchers analyzed differently structured networks to come up with their alternative algorithm.

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A group of UCSD researchers set out to gain a better understanding of the thermal balance of power plants and surfaces, but they quickly realized that they would first need to determine what roles cloud cover and relative humidity play in the transparency of the atmosphere to radiation at temperatures common on Earth. In the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, the group presents detailed radiative cooling resource maps they created to help determine the best climates for large-scale deployment of passive cooling technologies.

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Biochips are driving next-generation DNA sequencing technologies, and this powerful combination is capable of solving unique and important biological problems, such as single-cell, rare-cell or rare-molecule analysis, which next-generation sequencing can’t do on its own. In APL Bioengineering, researchers from Seoul National University explore the role advancements in biochip technology are playing in driving groundbreaking scientific discoveries and breakthroughs in medicine via next-generation sequencing, aka high-throughput sequencing.

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It sounds like an old-school vinyl record, but the distinctive crackle in the music streamed into Chris Holloway’s laboratory is atomic in origin. The group spent years finding a way to directly measure electric fields using atoms, so who can blame them for then having a little fun with their new technology? They don’t expect the atomic-recording’s lower sound quality to replace digital music recordings, but the team is considering how this “entertaining” example of atomic sensing could be applied in communication devices of the future.

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About 90% of cancer deaths are due to metastases, when tumors spread to other vital organs, and a research group recently realized that it’s not individual cells but rather distinct clusters of cancer cells that circulate and metastasize to other organs. As the group reports in AIP Advances, they set out to gain a better understanding of these circulating cancer cell clusters. The group’s microfluidic device brings a new therapeutic strategy to the fight against cancer metastasis.

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A new energy-efficient data routing algorithm could keep unmanned aerial vehicle swarms flying -- and helping -- longer, report an international team of researchers this month in the journal Chaos. UAV swarms are cooperative, intercommunicating groups of UAVs used for a wide and growing variety of civilian and military applications. In disaster response, UAV swarms linked to one or more local base stations act as eyes in the sky, providing first responders with crucial damage and survivor information.

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By using energy-efficient buildings and distributing means of energy generation, such as solar panels, throughout buildings, sustainable communities can achieve a yearly net zero energy balance. However, this average glosses over the local energy fluctuations that can challenge the supporting power grid. Researchers have now integrated power grid considerations into the model of a newly planned net zero energy district and examined energy fluctuations at 15-minute intervals. The analysis and recommendations are presented in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.

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Stroke, one of the leading causes of death worldwide, is normally caused by poor blood flow to the brain, or cerebral ischemia. This condition must be diagnosed within the first few hours of the stroke for treatment to be effective. Researchers have developed a device that uses near-infrared light to monitor blood flow. The hybrid instrument, which relies on the combination of two light measurement techniques, could be used to quickly and noninvasively diagnose cerebral ischemia. The work is described in AIP Advances.

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3D printers can be used to make a variety of useful objects by building up a shape, layer by layer. Scientists have used this same technique to “bioprint” living tissues. Bioprinting is a relatively new technology that has advanced mostly by trial and error. Scientists are now using the laws of physics and predictive computer modeling to improve these techniques and optimize the bioprinting process. These new advances are reviewed in Applied Physics Reviews.

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When hurricanes strike, loss of electricity ranks as one of the top concerns for relief workers. New work, described in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, looks to develop a strategy for how floating devices that harness the energy of ocean waves might be able to provide this much needed aid. A researcher at Johns Hopkins University is studying a new approach to supplying electricity that both potentially provides a way of optimizing recovery efforts and poses questions about how relief is currently conducted in disaster areas.

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Solar power researchers have traditionally used the power measurements from single residential solar photovoltaic systems to estimate the power generated within a city. But one installation isn’t a good representation of all rooftops.

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Video cameras continue to gain widespread use to monitor human activities for surveillance, health care, home use and more, but there are privacy and environmental limitations in how well they work. Acoustical waves are an alternative medium that may bypass those limitations. Unlike electromagnetic waves, acoustical waves can be used not only to find objects but also to identify them. As described in a new paper in Applied Physics Letters, the researchers used a 2D acoustic array and convolutional neural networks to detect and analyze the sounds of human activity.

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Superconductors’ never-ending flow of electrical current could provide new options for energy storage and superefficient electrical transmission and generation. But the signature zero electrical resistance of superconductors is reached only below a certain critical temperature and is very expensive to achieve. Physicists in Serbia believe they’ve found a way to manipulate superthin, waferlike monolayers of superconductors, thus changing the material’s properties to create new artificial materials for future devices. They discuss their work in the Journal of Applied Physics.

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Results reported in Biomicrofluidics promise a new way to detect prostate cancer through a simple device, which forces cell samples through channels less than 10 microns wide. When prostate cancer cells are forced through, the metastatic cells exhibit “blebbing,” and the experiments show that highly metastatic prostate cancer cells are more likely to exhibit blebbing than normal cells or even less-metastatic cells are. The new device could be used in a clinical setting to inexpensively test large numbers of samples.

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A drawback of solar panels is that they require sunlight to generate electricity. Some have observed that for a device on Earth facing space, the chilling outflow of energy from the device can be harvested using the same kind of optoelectronic physics we have used to harness solar energy. New work, in Applied Physics Letters, looks to provide a potential path to generating electricity like solar cells but that can power electronics at night.

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Shock wave studies allow researchers to achieve the warm dense matter that’s found only in the extreme conditions around stars and created in the laboratory for inertial confinement fusion research, and researchers in Israel recently set out to understand the relation, if any, between the evolution of a shock wave and the expansion of the exploding wire. They describe their work in the Physics of Plasmas.

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In 2013, Timothy Koeth received an extraordinary gift: a heavy metal cube and a crumpled message that read, “Taken from Germany, from the nuclear reactor Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger.” Koeth accepted the cube and its note as an invitation to the adventure of a lifetime. In Physics Today, Koeth and Miriam Hiebert describe what they’ve discovered while exploring the German quest and failure to build a working nuclear reactor during WWII.

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The 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 remains ones of the biggest mysteries in aviation. Recent efforts combining satellite data with a new mathematical approach, analyzing how debris moves around the ocean, aim to make headway in the search. Using what are known as Markov chain models, an international team of researchers has narrowed down a potential crash location substantially north of the region where most search efforts have concentrated. They discuss their work in this week’s journal Chaos

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An international group of researchers has taken one of the first major steps in finding the biological changes in the brain that drive fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. New work using chaos theory to analyze brain signals, discussed in the journal Chaos, shows the long-term effects. Researchers found that teenagers who were exposed to alcohol while in the womb showed altered brain connections that were consistent with impaired cognitive performance.

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The power to align water molecules is usually held by ice, which affects nearby water and encourages it to join the ice layer. But in the case of organisms in freezing habitats, a powerful antifreeze protein can convince water molecules to behave in ways that benefit the protein instead. In this week’s Journal of Chemical Physics, scientists are taking a closer look at the molecular structure of the antifreeze protein to understand how it works.

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Women constitute approximately 47 percent of the workforce yet are still underrepresented at the highest levels of business, government, medical and academic hierarchies. A team of researchers has developed a new model, described in the journal Chaos, to study the ascension of women through professional hierarchies. The model factors in the relative roles of bias and homophily, and unlike prior work, predicts that gender parity is not inevitable and deliberate intervention may be required in various fields to achieve gender balance.

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To prevent ice formation and subsequent drag on aircraft during flight, current systems utilize the heat generated by burning fuel, but these high-temperature, fuel-dependent systems cannot be used on the proposed all-electric, temperature-sensitive materials of next-generation aircraft. As some scientists search for new anti-icing methods, some have taken a different approach. They’ve published evidence in Physics of Fluids showing that equipment important in controlling landing and takeoff can double-up as icing control. It depends on plasma actuators.

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While many advancements have been in improving its efficiency, the refrigerator still consumes considerable amounts of energy each year. So researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China are working to minimize the cold loss that occurs at the thermal barrier between inside the freezer and outside the fridge. They hypothesized that using part of the cold loss to cool the fresh food compartment could be a promising solution. They describe their findings in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.

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In the future, ultrahigh-speed spintronics will require ultrafast coherent magnetization reversal within a picosecond -- one-trillionth of a second. While this may eventually be achieved via irradiation the small change of magnetization it generates has so far prevented any practical application of this technique. Now researchers report in Applied Physics Letters that they have explored ferromagnetic nanoparticles embedded within a semiconductor. Their theory was that the electric field of the terahertz pulse could be effectively applied to each nanoparticle.

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Soybean fields are becoming increasingly infested with a glyphosate-resistant weed called “palmer amaranth.” One pesticide currently used for controlling it is “Dicamba,” but it has devastating effects on adjacent areas, because it tends to drift when sprayed during windy conditions. Researchers report in Physics of Fluids that they were inspired to develop a drift-free, weed-specific applicator, which will pave the way for autonomous weed control with smart robots.

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Aneurysms form as abnormal bulges over an artery, and, if ruptured, can lead to serious health complications or even death. Some can exist for a long time without rupturing, and surgery can be risky, so a parameter to help surgeons is needed. Researchers report in Physics of Fluids that they have developed a simple nondimensional parameter that depends on both geometry and flow waveform to classify the flow mode in both sidewall and bifurcation aneurysms.

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The American Institute of Physics is accepting nominations for the 2019 AIP Science Writing Awards through March 29, 2019, in four categories: best science writing in 1) books; 2) magazine, newspaper or online articles; 3) children's books and other works intended for children; and 4) broadcast and online productions. Candidates may nominate their own work or be nominated by someone else.

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Transistors have been miniaturized for the past 50 years based on Moore’s law, an observation that the number of transistors on a chip can double roughly every 18 months while the cost is cut in half. But we’ve now reached the point where transistors can’t continue to be scaled any further. In the journal Applied Physics Letters, researchers review negative capacitance field-effect transistors, a new device concept that suggests traditional transistors can be made much more efficient by simply adding a thin layer of ferroelectric material. If it works, the same chip could compute far more, yet require less frequent charging of its battery.

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The American Institute of Physics announced today that its Board of Directors has elected astrophysicist David J. Helfand as its new chair. In his new role, Helfand will be responsible for providing leadership to AIP's Board of Directors and will guide their efforts overseeing governance, policy and corporate strategy for the Institute, a mission-driven nonprofit organization, devoted to advancing, promoting and serving the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity.

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Hyperbolic metamaterials are artificially made structures that can be formed by depositing alternating thin layers of a conductor such as silver or graphene onto a substrate. One of their special abilities is supporting the propagation of a very narrow light beam. This narrow beam can then be used to “fingerprint” and obtain spatial and material information about nanometer-scale objects -- allowing identification without complete images. Researchers report their work in APL Photonics.

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We rely on antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, but the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria forces doctors and patients to contend with shifting treatment plans. Furthermore, current laboratory tests to determine what bacteria is causing a particular infection takes days to complete and can be too late for the patient. Mechanical engineers in Korea recently developed a microchip antibiotic testing platform that takes only six to seven hours to determine the appropriate medication.

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The American Institute of Physics and the Acoustical Society of America are both accepting submissions for their respective 2019 science communication awards.

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Semiconductor manufacturing involve cleaning processes, and it’s become highly desirable to use physical cleaning techniques such as liquid jets or underwater ultrasound instead of toxic chemicals. Now, mechanical engineers specializing in the mechanism of fluid motion at Keio University have unveiled the underlying physics of what happens when liquid jet collisions strike surfaces to be cleaned. They report their work in the journal Physics of Fluids.

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How does one inspect solar panels in real time, in a way that is both cost-effective and time-efficient? Parveen Bhola, and Saurabh Bhardwaj, researchers at India’s Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, have spent the last few years developing and improving statistical and machine learning-based alternatives to enable real-time inspection of solar panels. Their research found a new application for clustering-based computation, which uses past meteorological data to compute performance ratios and degradation rates.

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The American Institute of Physics announced today that it has awarded the 2018 John Torrence Tate Award for International Leadership in Physics to Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti, “in recognition of her leadership as Spokesperson of the ATLAS international collaboration and as Director-General of CERN in promoting science as a vehicle for broad international cooperation.”

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The Heineman Foundation, the American Institute of Physics and American Astronomical Society congratulate Edwin A. Bergin, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of Michigan, for winning the 2019 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, which he wins “for his pioneering work in astrochemistry and innovative contributions to our understanding of the physics and chemistry of star and planet formation, and for his tireless efforts to improve diversity and inclusion in astronomy.”

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Magnetic recording is the primary technology underpinning today’s large-scale data storage, and companies are racing to develop new hard disk devices capable of recording densities greater than 1 terabit per square inch. In AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing, a group of researchers in India report their work tweaking the L10 phase, or crystallographic orientation, of an iron and platinum alloy as a solution.

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Despite the looming ecological consequences, glacier motion remains poorly understood. The roughness of bedrock, the temperature of the ice-bed interface and the presence of water-filled cavities all affect friction and influence how the ice will flow, but studying these factors poses unique challenges -- remote radar sensing by satellites and aircraft can track glacial movement, but it can’t peer through thousands of feet of ice to measure detailed properties of the ice and rock. In The Journal of Chemical Physics, Bo Persson describes a new model of ice friction that offers crucial insight into glacier flows.

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Magnetic field sensors can enhance applications that require efficient electric energy management. Improving magnetic field sensors below the picoTesla range could enable a technique to measure brain activity at room temperature with millisecond resolution without superconducting quantum interference device technology, which requires cryogenic temperatures to work. Researchers explored enhancing the magnetoresistance ratio in a CPP-GMR device by using a half-metallic Heusler CoFeAl0.5Si0.5 alloy. They report their findings in the Journal of Applied Physics.

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In microelectronic devices, the bandgap is a major factor determining the electrical conductivity of the underlying materials, and a more recent class of semiconductors with ultrawide bandgaps are capable of operating at much higher temperatures and powers than conventional small-bandgap silicon-based chips. In the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers provide a detailed perspective on the properties, capabilities, current limitations and future developments for one of the most promising UWB compounds, gallium oxide.

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Interactions with water dominate how drug molecules bind to targets, but it’s tricky to model these interactions, limiting the accuracy of drug design. In a recent paper in The Journal of Chemical Physics, William A. Goddard III and Saber Naserifar from the California Institute of Technology describe their novel approach to building a new description of water (known as a force field) and demonstrate its accuracy.

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A special issue of the interdisciplinary AVS journal Biointerphases, from AIP Publishing, appears this week online and focuses on the research results and reflections of a group of women at the forefront of biomaterials and biological interface research whose studies aim to improve human health through discovering basic, quantitative knowledge of the molecular world.

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The American Institute of Physics announced today that it has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to make a unique collection of rare books in the physical sciences universally accessible. The grant will enable AIP's Niels Bohr Library & Archives to provide global, digital access to the Wenner Collection, a carefully curated repository that features 3,800 volumes, dating back nearly five centuries. The grant will make the Wenner Collection accessible to the public for the first time, allowing for new use and engagement with these rare books.

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AIP Publishing has announced its selection of Daniel S. Clark, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and leader of the National Ignition Facility’s Capsule Modeling Working Group within the inertial confinement fusion Program, as the winner of the 2018 Ronald C. Davidson Award for Plasma Physics. The annual award is presented by AIP Publishing in collaboration with the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics, to recognize outstanding plasma physics research by an author published in the journal Physics of Plasmas.