In Physics of Fluids, researchers simulate an atomic bomb explosion from a typical intercontinental ballistic missile and the resulting blast wave to see how it would affect people sheltering indoors.
Nonpharmaceutical interventions slowed the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases but now, as NPIs are lifted, countries are seeing a resurgence in several respiratory diseases. In Chaos, scientists, using data from Hong Kong to develop their model, describe a threshold control method that can be used to predict the best time to lift NPIs without overwhelming the hospital systems when these other respiratory diseases inevitably surge back. They found that reintroducing NPI measures when a threshold of 600 severe cases is reached could ensure that the hospital system in Hong Kong is not overwhelmed by severely infected patients.
In Journal of Applied Physics, researchers present a special silicon nitride nanopore-based sensing device that is designed to provide volume information about tau and tubulin protein molecules and their aggregation states. To create the sensor, the team explored how the proteins change the current and voltage flowing through a nanopore system.
In APL Bioengineering, researchers develop an injectable hydrogel that treats infections around prosthetics without the problems caused by current treatments. The black phosphorus-enhanced gel has a porous structure, excellent injectability, and rapid self-healing properties. Tests show it has good stability and low toxicity to tissue cells, and irradiating the gel with near infrared light causes it to release silver ions. This process was highly efficient at inhibiting S. aureus, common bacteria that cause disease in humans.
TEAM-UP Together is pleased to announce its first cohort of scholars, 31 African American students who will each receive $10,000 for the 2022-23 academic year. The scholarship program aims to reduce financial barriers that prevent many Black students from completing their undergraduate education in physics and astronomy. A collective action initiative, TEAM-UP Together is a partnership between the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Astronomical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the Society of Physics Students. TEAM-UP Together is sponsored by the Simons Foundation International.
In Physics of Fluids, researchers design and analyze droplet experiments that were done on the International Space Station. The researchers sent four different surfaces with various roughness properties to the station, where they were mounted to a lab table. Cameras recorded the droplets as they spread and merged. The experimental results confirmed and expanded the parameter space of the Davis-Hocking model, a simple way to simulate droplets.
With numerical simulations, researchers have demonstrated a new way to time weak electrical pulses that can stop certain life-threatening arrhythmias. Publishing their work in Chaos, the group shows that timed pulses are successful in ending atrial and ventricular fibrillations. The study provides early evidence that one theorized approach to controlling fibrillations – adaptive deceleration pacing – can improve the performance of defibrillators.
In Physics of Fluids, researchers explore the lift production mechanism of flying snakes, which undulate side-to-side as they move from the tops of trees to the ground to escape predators or to move around quickly and efficiently. The investigators developed a computational model derived from data obtained through high-speed video of the snakes and considered several features, such as the angle of attack that the snake forms with the oncoming airflow and the frequency of its undulations, to determine which were important in producing glide.
Since oral cancer occurs in one of the most accessible sites in the body, it can be easily treated if detected promptly. In Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology B, researchers report a breakthrough hand-held biosensor that enables quick and accurate detection of oral cancer. The group's biosensor consists of a sensor strip, similar to a glucose strip, and a circuit board (a hand-held terminal like a glucometer) for detection.
AIP announced physicist Clifford V. Johnson as the winner of the 2022 Andrew Gemant Award "for portraying the humanistic dimensions of physics to the public through a creative array of artistic, performance, and educational methods." The annual prize recognizes the accomplishments of a person who has made significant contributions to the cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimension of physics. In addition to a $5,000 prize for Johnson, $3,000 will be given to a Los Angeles elementary school and their annual science fair, where students, parents, and community members participate in physics demonstrations and experiments.
In Physics of Fluids, researchers have been studying the dynamics of how crescent-shaped sand dunes are formed. Known as barchans, these formations are commonly found in various sizes and circumstances, on Earth and on Mars. Using a computational fluid dynamics approach, the team carried out simulations by applying the equations of motion to each grain in a pile being deformed by a fluid flow, showing the ranges of values for the proper computation of barchan dunes down to the grain scale.
In APL Bioengineering, researchers examine the local communication between endothelial cells and tumors cells and its effects on endothelial cell orientation. The approach uses co-cultured human umbilical vein endothelial cells and breast epithelial tumor cell lines to simulate the tumor-endothelial interaction. The group found the clockwise chirality of the hUVECs was less affected by local hormone signaling and more so by direct physical contact with tumor cells. Specific proteins on the tumor cell binding to others on endothelial cells appeared to play a role in changing the clockwise chirality of hUVECs.
At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Gautam Shah will discuss plans to test a supersonic aircraft with technology to alter how supersonic shock waves behave and reduce sonic booms. NASA will conduct a series of flights over various communities across the U.S., and Shah and his team will measure the sound of the aircraft and conduct public surveys to understand the public response to different noise levels. By providing this information to regulatory agencies, the group hopes to inform an overland supersonic sound standard.
Creating 3D-printed, low-cost, durable violins for music students, researchers have explored the factors that result in the best violin sounds and performed a concerto composed specifically for 3D-printed instruments. The violin was created in two sections. The body is made of a plastic polymer material and designed to produce a resonant tone, while the neck and fingerboard are printed in smooth ABS plastic to be comfortable in the musician's hands. The result is a violin that produces a darker, more mellow sound than traditionally made instruments.
AIP Publishing is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 APL Materials Excellence in Research Award, a distinction for young researchers who publish exceptional research in the journal.
Too much sun and too much heat can reduce the efficiency of photovoltaics. A solar farm with optimally spaced panels facing the correct direction could cool itself through convection using the surrounding wind. Researchers explored how to exploit the geometry of solar farms to enhance natural cooling mechanisms.
As a noninvasive neuromodulation method, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) shows great potential to treat a range of mental and psychiatric diseases, including major depression. Current methods don’t go quite deep enough and are largely restricted to superficial targets within the brain, but a new TMS array with a special geometrical-shaped magnet structure will help stimulate deeper tissue.
AIP Publishing is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Bo Wang of the Beijing Institute of Technology as the new Editor-in-Chief of APL Materials. Wang will lead the journal as it expands to represent material science, materials chemistry, and materials physics more holistically.
When an epidemic strikes, more than just infections spread. As cases mount, information about the disease, how to spot it, and how to prevent it propagates rapidly among people in affected areas as well.
AIP and APS are pleased to announce Nikita Nekrasov, a professor at Stony Brook University, as the recipient of the 2023 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics "for the elegant application of powerful mathematical techniques to extract exact results for quantum field theories, as well as shedding light on integrable systems and non-commutative geometry." The annual award acknowledges significant contributions to the field of mathematical physics and will be presented at an upcoming APS meeting.
AIP and the National Society of Black Physicists have awarded Trevor Rhone the 2022 Joseph A. Johnson III Award for Excellence and Cacey Bester an Honorable Mention. Now in its third year, the award recognizes early-career scientists who demonstrate scientific ingenuity and powerful mentorship and service – the core values of NSBP founder Joseph A. Johnson. The award and honorable mention will be presented at the National Society of Black Physicists 2022 Conference on Nov. 9 in Charlottesville, Virginia.
As low Earth orbit becomes more cluttered, it becomes increasingly necessary to use middle Earth orbits, and radiation-tolerant cell designs will be needed. Making photovoltaics thinner should increase their longevity because the charge carriers have less far to go during their shortened lifetimes. In Journal of Applied Physics, scientists propose a radiation-tolerant photovoltaic cell design that features an ultrathin layer of light-absorbing material. Compared to thicker cells, nearly 3.5 times less cover glass is needed for the ultra-thin cells to deliver the same amount of power after 20 years of operation.
The destruction of red blood cells, or mechanical hemolysis, is an inevitable complication of interventional devices, so scientists want to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. In Physics of Fluids, researchers develop a red blood cell destruction model based on simulations of dissipative particle dynamics within a high shear flow. The team discovered that acceleration during shearing is a major factor in red blood cell destruction, beyond exposure time and shear stress. They recommend adding a flow buffer structure to the structural design of ventricular assist devices to reduce part of the hemolysis caused by shear acceleration.
Although gun violence is a challenging problem in the U.S., few in-depth statistical studies have been carried out on a state-by-state basis. In Chaos, mathematicians provide a thorough analysis of gun violence incidents from early 2018 to mid-2022 in all 50 states and compare their results to historical events during that period. The investigators analyzed data provided by the Gun Violence Archive, using time series analysis, paying particular attention to the summer of 2020 when the national media reported widespread violence due to a combination of COVID-19 shutdowns, the murder of George Floyd, and subsequent protests and unrest.
When two musical notes are played simultaneously, the human ear can perceive weak additional tones called combination tones. While less perceivable, objective combination tones are also generated by some musical instruments.
The Hybrid Observatory for Earth-like Exoplanets proposes pairing the newest and largest ground-based telescopes with a starshade orbiting Earth to obstruct the light from a host star to identify and characterize an exoplanet. AIP, with NASA and SPS, is organizing a competition for undergraduate students in the physical sciences to design such a starshade.
In the American Journal of Physics, researchers developed an online undergraduate physics lab course using small robotic bugs, called Hexbug Nanos (TM), to engage students in scientific research from their homes. The bugs look like bright-colored beetles with 12 flexible legs that move rapidly in a semi-random manner. This makes collections ideal models for exploring particle behavior that can be difficult to visualize, and students used them to complete experiments to investigate concepts in statistical mechanics and electrical conduction.
AIP Publishing has selected Ian H. Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, as the recipient of its 2022 Ronald C. Davidson Award for Plasma Physics for his paper, "Electron holes in phase space: What they are and why they matter." The annual award of $5,000 is presented in collaboration with the APS Division of Plasma Physics to recognize outstanding plasma physics research by a Physics of Plasmas author.
Predicting the rupture of aneurysms is crucial for medical prevention and treatment. As aspect ratio and size ratio increase and an aneurysm expands, the stress applied against the aneurysm walls and the time blood spends within it increase. This leads the probability of rupture to rise. In Physics of Fluids, researchers develop a patient-specific mathematical model to examine what aneurysm parameters influence rupture risk prior to surgery. Computed tomography scans are fed into the model, which reconstructs the geometry and blood flow of the aneurysm. It then uses equations to describe the fluid flow, generating information about the blood vessel walls and blood flow patterns.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” To help journalists and the public understand the context of this work, AIP is compiling a Nobel Prize resources page featuring relevant scientific papers and articles, quotes from experts, photos, multimedia, and other resources.
Even small objects, such as dust and leaves, can block sunlight from reaching solar cells, and understanding how the loss of incoming radiation affects power output is essential for optimizing photovoltaic technology. In the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, researchers explore how different shade conditions impact performance of single solar cells and two-cell systems connected in series and parallel. They found that the decrease in output current of a single cell or two cells connected in parallel was nearly identical to the ratio of shade to sunlight. However, for two cells running in series, there was excess power loss.
In The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, scientists explore how digital health solutions can expand audiology services in clinical and research settings. Audiology assessment via telehealth would allow patients to access care while a specialist is located hundreds of miles away and, as a research tool, telehealth would allow for more representative and decentralized data on hearing, without compromising results. The team is currently scaling up several studies they conducted in rural areas of Alaska; their mission is to close the gap on hearing health disparities.
AIP Publishing is excited to announce Monica Lira-Cantu as the founding Editor-in-Chief of APL Energy, its newest gold open access journal. She will lead APL Energy in its mission to disseminate research related to energy and its storage, conversion, sources, and materials. The journal will also examine renewability, sustainability, and the environmental impacts of energy technologies. It will open for submissions in 2022 and begin publishing in 2023.
Scientists are using in vitro skeletal muscle engineering to gain a better understanding of the complex genetic and environmental factors underlying diabetes, putting lab-grown, healthy skeletal muscle tissues in a state resembling diabetes or growing skeletal muscle from diabetic patients' muscle stem cells. In Biophysics Reviews, researchers describe how skeletal muscle engineering has advanced significantly during the past few decades and recent developments that make it easier to explore diabetes in humans and have led to more personalized medicine.
In Biomicrofluidics, scientists in China created a model alveolar system that mimics the breathing action of the human lung and allows visualization of flow patterns within the alveoli. The chip they designed includes tubes arranged like the structure of a bifurcation point in the bronchial network. The upper layer of the chip is made of a flexible polymer molded into small tubes that mimic the alveolar structure. The lower layer is glass, which allows the authors to visualize fluid flow through the tubes.
In Biophysics Reviews, researchers explore how human tissue models can be used to examine the impact of heart attacks and treatment of the fibrotic tissue outside the body, improving treatment and diagnosis. They use organoids, 3D organlike multicellular models derived from stem cells, to mimic natural development, structural organization, regeneration, and disease progression. Meanwhile, microfluidic devices control cell placement and fluid flow to act like the heart on a chip, while bioprinting allows cardiac tissue to be built up layer by layer.
In the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers develop a method to identify aortic valve dysfunction using complex network analysis that is accurate, simple to use, and low-cost. They used heart sound data to create a complex network of connected points, which was split into sections, and each part was represented with a node. If the sound in two portions was similar, a line was drawn between them. In a healthy heart, the graph showed two distinct clusters of points, with many nodes unconnected. A heart with aortic stenosis contained many more correlations and edges.
Superheated steam dishwashers could provide a more effective, environmentally friendly solution than conventional dishwashers. In Physics of Fluids, researchers simulated such a dishwasher, finding that it killed 99% of bacteria on a plate in just 25 seconds. The model of an idealized dishwasher looks like a box with solid sides, a top opening, and a nozzle at the bottom. A plate covered with heat-resistant bacteria is placed directly above the nozzle. Once the plate reaches a certain threshold temperature, the microorganisms are deemed inactivated.
Abundant internet claims about the acoustic power of the Saturn V suggest that it melted concrete and lit grass on fire over a mile away, but such ideas are undeniably false. In The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, researchers used a physics-based model to estimate the rocket's acoustic levels and obtained a value of 203 decibels, which matched the limited data from the 1960s. So, while the Saturn V was extremely loud, that kind of power is nowhere near enough to melt concrete or start grass fires.
Orchestral ensembles have faced many challenges when starting to perform again during the COVID pandemic, and contamination is a chief concern: specifically, whether wind instruments are vectors of contamination through aerosol dispersion. In Physics of Fluids, researchers worked with musicians to deepen our understanding of how much aerosol is produced and dispersed by wind instruments. They used visualization to characterize the flow, tracked fog particles in the air, and measured aerosol concentration from wind instruments with a particle counter. Then they combined these to develop an equation to describe aerosol dispersion.
Researchers have devised a plasma-based way to produce and separate oxygen within the Martian environment. It's a complementary approach to NASA's Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment and may deliver high rates of molecule production per kilogram of instrumentation sent to space. In the Journal of Applied Physics, the team presents the method for harnessing and processing local resources to generate products on Mars.
A common method of administering drugs is orally, by swallowing a pill or capsule. But oral administration is the most complex way for the human body to absorb an active pharmaceutical ingredient, because the bioavailability of the drug in the gastrointestinal tract depends on the medication's ingredients and the stomach's dynamic physiological environment. In Physics of Fluids, researchers from employ a biomimetic in-silico simulator based on the realistic anatomy and morphology of the stomach – a "StomachSim" – to investigate and quantify the effect of body posture and stomach motility on drug bioavailability.
When racehorses enter training at about 2 years old, they can develop tiny stress fractures and new bone formations in their legs. This condition, called bucked shin, occurs in about 70% of the animals. In The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, researchers have developed a method to screen for bucked shin using ultrasound. Axial transmission, in which an ultrasound emitter and receiver are placed on the skin to induce and measure wave velocities, is frequently used to study osteoporosis in humans. The method could detect bucked shin more easily and preserve the health and growth of young horses.
In Applied Physics Reviews, scientists at UCLA describe their development of a type of wearable human-machine interface device that is stretchable, inexpensive, and waterproof. The device is based on a soft magnetoelastic sensor array that converts mechanical pressure from the press of a finger into an electrical signal. The device involves two main components: a layer that translates mechanical movement to a magnetic response and a magnetic induction layer consisting of patterned liquid metal coils.
The Journal of Mathematical Physics has recognized Sam Collingbourne as the winner of its 2021 Young Researcher Award. His work on the stability properties of space-times in high dimensions culminated in the winning publication, "The Gregory-Laflamme instability of the Schwarzschild black string exterior." The judges selected Collingbourne from a pool of JMP authors and the prize includes $3,000. Collingbourne explores solutions to the Einstein equation, which relates the curvature and geometry of space-time to the matter content in space-time.
In Applied Physics Letters, researchers highlight the latest nanostructured components integrated on image sensor chips that are most likely to make the biggest impact in multimodal imaging and detailed a promising approach to detect multiple-band spectra by fabricating an on-chip spectrometer. The developments could enable autonomous vehicles to see around corners instead of just a straight line, biomedical imaging to detect abnormalities at different tissue depths, and telescopes to see through interstellar dust.
In the American Journal of Physics, Aaron Slepkov from Trent University explores the physics of how polarization-filtered colors emerge, how they can be controlled, and why subtle changes in viewing angle, sample orientation, and the order of layers of films between polarizers can have dramatic effects on the observed colors. The research emphasizes visual examples of concepts related to birefringence, such as addition, subtraction, and order-of-operations.
AIP is launching "Initial Conditions: A Physics History Podcast" on July 21. Weekly episodes will delve into the collections of the Niels Bohr Library & Archives to uncover the unexpected stories behind physics discoveries. Co-hosts Maura Shapiro and Justin Shapiro use their knowledge of science and history to tell the stories that have been overlooked in the history of physics. The first three episodes will examine how climate change was studied in the 20th century and how those debates about climate still resonate today.
In Chaos, researchers explore the factors driving background checks, and whether coordination between U.S. states may exist and if one state exerts influence over others in terms of enacting gun laws or acquiring firearms. They researchers constructed a rigorous mathematical approach to interpret the patterning of firearm background check data and found these patterns of frequency oscillations are different at various time points. This suggests states may have interacted differently with each other during the terms of Bush, Obama, and Trump.
The journal Biomicrofluidics has selected Ikram Khan as the winner of its 2021 Best Paper award. The designation highlights significant contributions by emerging authors in microfluidics and nanofluidics and is determined by an expert panel of judges. In the winning paper, "A low-cost 3D printed microfluidic bioreactor and imaging chamber for live-organoid imaging," the authors developed a system capable of supporting brain organoid growth while allowing long-term live imaging and drug delivery support. Organoids, or biological systems grown in vitro, act as important models for studying normal and diseased development.
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