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A French nanorobotics team has assembled a new microrobotics system that pushes forward the frontiers of optical nanotechnologies. Combining several existing technologies, the µRobotex nanofactory builds microstructures in a large vacuum chamber and fixes components onto optical fiber tips with nanometer accuracy. The microhouse construction, reported in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology A, demonstrates how researchers can advance optical sensing technologies when they manipulate ion guns, electron beams and finely controlled robotic piloting.

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Scientists are now working to take cloaking devices from the dramatic realm of science fiction and make them real. Amanda D. Hanford, at Pennsylvania State University, is taking the introductory steps to make acoustic ground cloaks. These materials redirect approaching waves around an object without scattering the wave energy, concealing the object from the sound waves. During the 175th ASA Meeting, Hanford will describe the physics behind an underwater acoustic shield designed in her lab.

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Sorry, new parents -- even though your infants appreciate your coos, they prefer to hear sounds from their peers -- other babies. Even at the pre-babbling stage, infants recognize vowel-like sounds, but they tend to dwell on these sounds when from the mouths of babes. At the 175th ASA Meeting, researchers will present from a new line of research focusing on one aspect of infant speech development: how babies perceive speech with infant vocal properties.

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Locating and discriminating sound sources is extremely complex because the brain must process spatial information from many, sometimes conflicting, cues. Using virtual reality and other immersive technologies, researchers can use new methods to investigate how we make sense of the word with sound. At the 175th ASA Meeting, G. Christopher Stecker will survey his team’s use of virtual reality and augmented auditory reality to study how people use explicit and implicit sound cues.

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New technologies for mobile devices may use ultrasonic sound waves, and these devices have varying effects on different subsets of the population. Regulation of these technologies is in many ways “the wild west,” according to Timothy Leighton, who wrote a guide for moving forward in today’s new world of ultrasonic exposure. He will describe his work uncovering the strange history and uncertain future of the use of ultrasonic sound waves during the 175th ASA Meeting.

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Tornado-producing storms can emit infrasound more than an hour before tornadogenesis, which inspired a group of researchers to develop a long-range, passive way of listening in on storms. During the 175th ASA Meeting, Brian Elbing will present his group’s work collecting infrasound measurements from tornadoes to decode information contained in waves about the formation processes and life cycle before potentially devastating storms hit.

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Using both ears to hear increases speech recognition and improves sound localization. Ruth Litovsky, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wants to bring this advantage to people who use cochlear implants. During the 175th ASA Meeting, Litovsky will present data showing a new technique that synchronizes the cochlear signals that stimulate the brain in a way that is similar to people who can hear normally.

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Fossil primates provide important clues about human evolution, but the sounds they made and the soft tissue involved in making those sounds weren’t preserved. So chimpanzees can provide important points of comparison for inferring the sorts of sounds our early ancestors may have made. During the 175th ASA Meeting, Michael Wilson, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, will present his group’s work searching for similarities between the vocal communications of chimpanzees and humans.

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Humans communicate their intentions, feelings and desires verbally, so voice disorders can have devastating personal and professional consequences. A perceived voice abnormality may lead to a negative assessment of the speaker’s intelligence, health and personality. During the 175th ASA Meeting, researchers will describe their work on voice perception and what it means for a voice to sound “normal.”

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Beta peptides have become a key tool in building more robust biomaterials. These synthetic molecules mimic the structure of small proteins, but they are protected against processes that degrade natural peptides. A new study has expanded what we can do with these crafty peptides. Published in APL Bioengineering, the researchers show that molecules that have previously posed challenges to bioengineers can now be used to make new kinds of biomaterials.

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While it is obvious that things like boats can be heard by marine life under the water, what about human activities like swimming, canoeing and scuba diving? During the 175th ASA Meeting, Christine Erbe, director of the Centre for Marine Science & Technology at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, will describe her work exploring the impact of man-made underwater noise on marine life.

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To make open offices less noisy, researchers are creating small “acoustic islands” using high-back chairs and retroreflective ceilings to direct sound to help you hear your own conversations -- not others’ -- better. During the 175th ASA Meeting, Manuj Yadav, at the University of Sydney, will present his and his colleagues’ work toward solutions to the speech distraction problem in open-plan offices.

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Conventional memory devices use transistors and rely on electric fields to store and read out information. An alternative approach uses magnetic fields, and a promising version relies on the magnetoelectric effect which allows an electric field to switch the magnetic properties of the devices. Existing devices, however, tend to require large magnetic and electric fields. One potential solution is a new switching element made from chromia. The researchers report their findings in Applied Physics Letters.

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Fundamental researchers have proposed a novel two-part system for separating impurities from natural gas in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy. Natural gas primarily contains methane, but impurities in the gaseous mixture need to be removed before the methane can be put into the pipeline. The newly proposed purification system combines two separation methods and, in principle, promises to improve performance, reduce costs and diminish ecological side effects compared to benchmark technologies.

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When people sweat, they unknowingly release a wide range of chemicals that can noninvasively inform clinicians on anything from stress hormone levels to glucose. An international team of researchers recently developed a new membrane that mitigates both issues that arise from direct dermal contact and sweat dilution for sweat biosensors. As discussed in Biomicrofluidics, the membrane performs hundreds of times better than other methods and holds up to repeated use.

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In an experiment that mimics astrophysical conditions, with cryogenic temperatures in an ultrahigh vacuum, scientists used an electron gun to irradiate thin sheets of ice covered in basic molecules of methane, ammonia and carbon dioxide, the building blocks of life. The experiment tested how the combination of electrons and basic matter leads to more complex biomolecule forms -- and perhaps eventually to life forms. The researchers discuss their work in The Journal of Chemical Physics.

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A major issue that limits modeling to predict cardiac arrhythmia is that it is impossible to measure and monitor all the variables that make our hearts tick, but researchers have now developed an algorithm that uses artificial intelligence to model the electrical excitations in heart muscle. Their work, appearing in Chaos, draws on partial differential equations describing excitable media and echo state networks to cross-predict variables about chaotic electrical wave propagations in cardiac tissue.

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In new experiments reported in Applied Physics Letters, researchers have shown that a wide-bandgap semiconductor called gallium oxide can be engineered into nanometer-scale structures that allow electrons to move much faster within the crystal structure. With electrons that move with such ease, Ga2O3 could be a promising material for applications such as high-frequency communication systems and energy-efficient power electronics.

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Trans 1,3-butadiene, the smallest polyene, has challenged researchers over the past 40 years because of its complex excited-state electronic structure and its ultrafast dynamics. Butadiene remains the “missing link” between ethylene, which has only one double bond, and longer linear polyenes with three or more double bonds. Now, an experimental team has solved trans 1,3-butadiene’s electronic-structural dynamics. The researchers recently reported their findings in The Journal of Chemical Physics.

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The American Institute of Physics announced today that particle physicist and movie producer David Kaplan has won the 2018 Andrew Gemant Award, an annual prize recognizing contributions to the cultural, artistic and humanistic dimension of physics.

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Theoretical physicists used simulations to explain the unusual readings collected in 2009 by the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging mission. The origin of energetic electrons detected in Mercury’s magnetic tail has puzzled scientists. This new study, appearing in Physics of Plasmas, provides a possible solution to how these energetic electrons form.

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Machine learning algorithms excel at finding complex patterns within big data, so researchers often use them to make predictions. Researchers are pushing the technology beyond finding correlations to help uncover hidden cause-effect relationships and drive scientific discoveries. At the University of South Florida, researchers are integrating machine learning techniques into their work studying proteins. As they report in The Journal of Chemical Physics, one of their main challenges has been a lack of methods to identify cause-effect relationships in data obtained from molecular dynamics simulations.

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Each year, the effects of corroding materials sap more than $1 trillion from the global economy. As certain alloys are exposed to extreme stress and temperatures, an oxide film begins to form, causing the alloys to break down even more quickly. What precisely makes these conditions so conducive for corrosion, however, remains poorly understood, especially in microelectromechanical devices. Chinese researchers have started to chip away at why these materials corrode under mechanical stress; they describe their work in the Journal of Applied Physics.

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Advances in nanotechnology have made it possible to control the size, shape, composition, elasticity and chemical properties of laboratory-made nanomaterials. Yet many of these materials do not to function as expected in the body. In a recent issue of Biointerphases, the team homes in on biomembranes -- the gatekeeping bilipid-layers and proteins surrounding cells. They explore the barriers a synthetic nanomaterial must breach to enter a cell and achieve its intended purpose.

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When power generators transfer electricity to homes, businesses and the power grid, they lose almost 10 percent of the generated power. To address this problem, scientists are researching new diamond semiconductor circuits to make power conversion systems more efficient. Researchers in Japan successfully fabricated a key circuit in power conversion systems using hydrogenated diamond. These circuits can be used in diamond-based electronic devices that are smaller, lighter and more efficient than silicon-based devices. They report their findings in this week’s Applied Physics Letters.

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Science promises to sound more exciting than ever at this year's Acoustical Society of America meeting. Presenters will reveal the latest in acoustics research with insight into topics like how new materials could control acoustic waves, improving audio in virtual reality, acoustic levitation, and how certain insects use acoustics to attract a mate, as well as much more.

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Researchers from Vanderbilt aim to unlock how irradiation -- part of radiation therapy in cancer treatment -- might alter the mechanical properties of the microenvironment. The team demonstrated that ionizing radiation can reduce the stiffness of both the extracellular matrix of an extracted tumor and an isolated matrix of collagen fibers. Appearing this week in APL Bioengineering, the results pave the way for irradiation to be used to create matrices with tailored properties.

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Typically, when a soundwave strikes a surface, it reflects back at the same fundamental frequency with a different amplitude. A new model, reported in the Journal of Applied Physics, shows that when a sound wave hits a nonlinear elastic metasurface, the incident fundamental frequency does not bounce back. Instead, the metasurface converts that energy into the wave’s second harmonic resonance. Developing this metasurface could help architects reduce noise from performance halls to cityscapes.

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Optoelectronic engineers have manufactured a special type of LCD that is paper-thin, flexible, light and tough. With this, a newspaper could be uploaded onto a flexible paperlike display that could be updated as fast as the news cycles. It sounds futuristic, but scientists estimate it will be cheap to produce, perhaps only costing $5 for a 5-inch screen. The new optically rewritable LCD design was reported this week in Applied Physics Letters.

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Fiber-optic cables package everything from financial data to cat videos into light, but when the signal arrives at your local data center, it runs into a silicon bottleneck. Instead of light, computers run on electrons moving through silicon-based chips, which are less efficient than photonics. To break through, scientists have been developing lasers that work on silicon. In this week’s APL Photonics, researchers write that the future of silicon-based lasers may be in quantum dots.

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Single crystal tin selenide is a semiconductor and an ideal thermoelectric material; it can directly convert waste heat to electrical energy or be used for cooling. When a group of researchers from Case Western Reserve University saw the graphenelike layered crystal structure of SnSe, they had one of those magical “aha!” moments. The group reports in the Journal of Applied Physics that they immediately recognized this material’s potential to be fabricated in nanostructure forms.

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In a news story for the Inside Science News Service this week, staff journalist and editor Jason Socrates Bardi describes a project by California scientists who genetically engineered yeast with basil and mint genes to give beer a hoppy flavor without the need to add the actual flowers. Read the story for free today.

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The American Institute of Physics is accepting nominations for the 2018 AIP Science Writing Awards through March 30, 2018. These awards were established in 1968 to recognize some of the best examples of science writing in the previous year. Winners will receive $3,000, an engraved Windsor chair, a certificate of recognition, and a trip to the awards ceremony at an upcoming national science meeting where the prizes will be presented.

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Weather patterns, brain activity and heartbeats each generate lines of complex data. To analyze this data, researchers must first divide up this continuous data into discrete pieces -- a task difficult to perform simply and accurately. Researchers have devised a method to transform data from complex systems, reducing the amount of important information lost, while still using less computing power than existing methods. They describe this new method in the current issue of Chaos.

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In this week’s issue of Journal of Applied Physics, investigators report the discovery of a new material that may be able to directly detect dark matter. The material, known as a scintillator, should be sensitive to dark matter that is lighter than a proton. This will allow the search for dark matter to enter a largely unexplored mass range, below that of the proton.

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Japanese researchers have optimized the design of laboratory-grown, synthetic diamonds. This brings the new technology one step closer to enhancing biosensing applications, such as magnetic brain imaging. The advantages of this layered, sandwichlike, diamond structure are described in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters.

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Some cannabis-derived treatments are now being tested for their ability to help certain skin diseases in a new story from nonprofit journalism news service Inside Science (ISNS)

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In a new story for the Inside Science News Service, freelance journalist Marcus Woo explores the falling popularity of high-top basketball shoes and how researchers and other experts think the change might affect the frequency of ankle injuries. Read the story for free today.

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In supersonic engines, achieving the right flow speed, producing the right ratio of evaporated fuel and causing ignition at the right time is complex. Vortices are affected by the shock wave, and this changes the way the fuel combusts and multiplies the number of possibilities of how particles can behave. To deepen our understanding, researchers use numerical modeling to calculate the huge variety of possible outcomes. They discuss their work in Physics of Fluids.

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When noble metals are treated with an aliphatic thiol, a uniform monolayer self-assembles on the surface; this phenomenon is interesting because the conducting molecules produce unique quantum properties that could be useful in electronics. Attempts to measure the current across this thin skim have yielded varied results, but researchers in France developed a stable mechanical setup to measure conductance across individual molecules with greater success. The results are in this week’s Journal of Applied Physics.

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Chemical compounds carry distinctive absorption “fingerprints,” within the mid-infrared spectral region; this offers an opportunity to measure and study chemicals at extremely sensitive levels, but researchers currently lack the tools required. In a breakthrough, NIST researchers developed an on-silicon-chip laser source with outputs that consist of precisely defined and equally spaced optical lines within the mid-infrared spectral region. They report their findings in APL Photonics.

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Spin caloritronics explores how heat currents transport electron spin, and researchers are particularly interested in how waste heat could be used to power next-generation spintronic devices. The thermally driven transport application of spin caloritronics is based on the Seebeck effect; researchers in China have theoretically exposed the fundamental aspects of this thermal transport along double-stranded DNA molecules. They reported their findings in the Journal of Applied Physics.

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Bioreactors are used to produce different therapeutics in the biopharmaceutical and regenerative medicine industries. Drug development relies on small multi-well plates shaken around an orbital diameter, while production-scale bioreactors are agitated by stirring. These different methods yield different fluid dynamics. Researchers in the U.K. are starting to bridge this gap by applying analytical techniques for stirred bioreactors to the fluid dynamics of orbitally shaken bioreactors. They discuss their work in this week’s Physics of Fluids.

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Researchers at the National University of Singapore have created a new platform with the potential to extract tiny circulating biomarkers of disease from patient blood. This simple, fast and convenient technique could help realize liquid biopsy diagnostics -- a less invasive procedure than the current gold standard: tumor biopsies. Details of the new technique, which utilizes standard laboratory equipment, are reported in this week's Biomicrofluidics.

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Calcium ions enable cells to communicate with one another, allowing neurons to interact, muscles to contract, and the heart's muscle cells to synchronize and beat. To better understand these processes, researchers often use computer simulations, but accurate models are challenging and computationally expensive. In this week’s The Journal of Chemical Physics, researchers demonstrate how a straightforward modification in a computer model leads to highly accurate simulations, which serve as powerful tools for studying a range of biological processes.

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The average rate at which Americans tip for services has been increasing steadily for decades, but the practice has been branded over the years as classist, anti-egalitarian, and downright undemocratic, leading some restaurateurs to abandon it. A new paper, drawing insight from nonlinear dynamics and published in the journal Chaos, hopes to shed light on the economically irrational world of tipping, showing that at a certain point, banning the practice might be fair and profitable.

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Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the United States and around the world. February is American Heart Month, and to honor healthy heart health awareness, Bioengineering Today, an editorially independent news service of AIP Publishing, is featuring stories on heart imaging this month.

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Many of the drugs and therapies available today for treating breast cancer target the cancer cells but tend to neglect the surrounding “local environment,” which includes surrounding tissues. But cancer cells and their local environment are connected, so both undergo chemical and physical changes during tumor development. During the 62nd Biophysical Society Meeting, researchers will present work exploring the role physical changes within a cancer cells’ local environment play in the aggressiveness of breast cancer.

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Lens technologies have advanced across all scales, from digital cameras and high bandwidth in fiber optics to the LIGO lab instruments. Now, a new lens technology that could be produced using standard computer-chip technology is emerging and could replace the bulky layers and complex geometries of traditional curved lenses. Researchers at Harvard and Argonne National Laboratory have developed a device that integrates mid-infrared spectrum metalenses onto MEMS. They report their work in this week’s APL Photonics.

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Organic polymer solar cells show potential to provide solar power to remote microwatt sensors, wearable technology and the Wi-Fi-connected appliances constituting the “internet of things.” While PSCs cannot match the durability or efficiency of inorganic solar cells, the potential to mass-produce nontoxic, disposable solar panels using roll-to-roll production makes them attractive for additional applications. In this week’s Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, researchers review the latest advances and remaining challenges in PSC technology.