UD's Swati Singh receives National Science Foundation CAREER award to study dark sector
Swati Singh, a University of Delaware assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been awarded a five-year, $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development Award (NSF CAREER) to explore new methods for studying the dark sector
Microfountain Pen Draws Minute Patterns for Live Cells, Circuits
In Review of Scientific Instruments, from AIP Publishing, researchers from Germany and China outline the development of a flexible and easy-to-use micropen setup, capable of directly writing on surfaces to a microprecise level. The micropen is held over an ink reservoir as ink is drawn into the pen nozzle. Once filled, the nozzle is positioned for writing onto a tabletop surface.
You can help scientists study the Sun
A new citizen science project, led by researchers at the University of Minnesota with support from NASA, allows volunteers to play an important role in learning more about the Sun by using their personal computers.
Smart Transformable Nanoparticles Promise Advances in Tumor Diagnoses, Treatment
In Applied Physics Reviews, by AIP Publishing, researchers from China and the United States examine how biology triggers morphological changes in certain types of nanoparticles. These types of particles are called smart transformable nanoparticles, because they can alter their size and shape upon stimulation from their surrounding environment.
Fusion's role in fighting climate change
Physicists Robert Goldston and Jacob Schwartz present a broad overview of the development of fusion energy on Earth and relate it to the mitigation of climate change.
Daniel Sinars: Then and Now / 2011 Early Career Award Winner
Supported by his 2011 Early Career award, physicist Daniel Sinars created the first platforms and images of the X-ray sources created on the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories.
New Los Alamos program supports opportunities for indigenous women in physics
A newly funded program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in collaboration with Fort Lewis College, supports undergraduate indigenous women interested in a career in physics.
New Leader of San Diego Supercomputer Center Named
The lead of SDSC's Distributed High-Throughput Computing Group, executive director of the Open Science Grid, a physics professor and a founding faculty member of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego becomes SDSC's new director.
Understanding Mouthfeel of Food Using Physics
Our understanding of how microscopic structure and changes in the shape of food affect food texture remains underdeveloped, so researchers from Denmark and Germany conducted a series of experiments relating food microstructure and rheology to texture. In Physics of Fluids, they used coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy to relate the molecular makeup of the fat in foods with the rheological and mechanical properties of the food. The foods in question: foie gras and pate.
Measuring the Speed of Sound in Dense Nuclear Matter
Physicists have proposed a method to measure the speed of sound characterizing matter created in nuclear collisions. Heavy nuclei consist of hundreds of protons and neutrons, which themselves are composed of quarks and gluons. In heavy-ion collisions, the energy density of matter reaches very high levels, and the nucleons become a quark-gluon plasma. Experimental analyses can reveal properties of the quark-gluon plasma, helping scientists learn about the thermodynamics of dense nuclear matter.
Printing Technique Creates Effective Skin Equivalent, Heals Wounds
In APL Bioengineering, researchers have developed an approach to print skin equivalents, which may play a future role in facilitating the healing of chronic wounds. They used suspended layer additive manufacturing, creating a gel-like material to support the skin equivalent that can then support a second phase of gel injection. During printing, the skin layers are deposited within the support gel. After printing, the team washed away the support material, leaving behind the layered skin equivalent.
Air Bubbles Sound Climate Change's Impact on Glaciers #ASA181
Air trapped with ice below glacier surfaces becomes a compressed bubble-ice mixture that builds pressure during the long passage to the glacier terminus. The glacier ice holds ancient bubbles of air that can be up to 20 atmospheres of pressure and generate detectable sounds when they are released as the ice melts. Scientists can listen to the release of the air and potentially use the sounds to help them gauge the impact of climate change on the ice floes.
Shaping up nicely: Adjusting the plasma edge can improve the performance of a star on Earth
While trying out a new device that injects powder to clean up the walls of the world's largest stellarator, scientists were pleased to find that the bits of atoms confined by magnetic fields within the device got temporarily hotter after each injection, leading to better fusion performance.
Scientists Show How to Increase the Endurance of Stainless Steel by 1.8 Times
Associate Professor of RUDN University in partnership with scientists from Italy and Turkey found the optimal parameters for cold working on steel. This makes it possible to increase the endurance of 316L steel by 81.25%.
Wild blue wonder: X-ray beam explores food color protein
A natural food colorant called phycocyanin provides a fun, vivid blue in soft drinks, but it is unstable on grocery shelves. Cornell University's synchrotron is helping to steady it.
Lego Down! Focused Vibrations Knock Over Minifigures #ASA181
To demonstrate the power of focused vibrations, researchers use speaker shakers to generate vibrations in a plate. They place Lego minifigures on the plate, choose a target, and measure the impulse response between each shaker and the target location. Playing that very response from the shakers, but reversed in time, creates sound waves that constructively interfere at the target minifigure. The focused energy knocks over the single Lego minifig without disrupting the surrounding minifigs.
Physicists exploit space and time symmetries to control quantum materials
Physicists from Exeter and Trondheim have developed a theory describing how space reflection and time reversal symmetries can be exploited, allowing for greater control of transport and correlations within quantum materials.
Department of Energy Announces $5.7 Million for Research on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) for Nuclear Physics Accelerators and Detectors
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $5.7 million for six projects that will implement artificial intelligence methods to accelerate scientific discovery in nuclear physics research.
Filtering Unwanted Sounds from Baby Monitors #ASA181
Researchers at Johns Hopkins APL team aim to create an ideal baby monitor that alerts parents when their baby needs attention but does not transmit or amplify sound from other sources. The project uses open-source audio processing hardware, originally intended for hearing aids, to filter out unwanted noises that may lead parents to turn down their baby monitor volume and potentially miss infant cries. They plan to keep babies' whole frequency range in mind as they explore signal processing options.
Jefferson Lab Accelerator Gets a Fresh Pair of Eyes
A newly invented detector is allowing physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility to "see" neutrons like never before. Fresh insight from these devices has improved operation of the lab's powerful electron accelerator, which is used in nuclear physics studies of the atom's nucleus.
Record-breaking simulations of large-scale structure formation in the universe
Current simulations of cosmic structure formation do not accurately reproduce the properties of ghost-like particles called neutrinos that have been present in the Universe since its beginning. But now, a research team from Japan has devised an approach that solves this problem.
New research effort shines more light on black hole collisions
While light can't escape the monstrous gravity of a black hole, that hasn't kept researchers on a team that includes University of Oregon (UO) scientists from taking a big step forward in the effort to reveal their secrets. UO researchers are a key part of LIGO, an international effort to find and understand gravitational waves. Last week, the LIGO team released the largest catalog of gravitational wave data yet, detailing 35 new collisions from their latest data collection run. Fourteen UO researchers, including nine students, contributed to the new release.
Story tips: For the birds, fresh twist on heat, upcycling plastics and probing for COVID particles
ORNL story tips: For the birds, fresh twist on heat, upcycling plastics and probing for COVID particles
New Computational Approach Predicts Chemical Reactions at High Temperatures
Columbia engineers invent "green" method that combines quantum mechanics with machine learning to accurately predict oxide reactions at high temperatures when no experimental data is available; could be used to design clean carbon-neutral processes for steel production and metal recycling.