Sandwich systems of thin film transition metal oxides display surprising properties at their interfaces. In case of the paradigmatic example of Lanthan-Aluminate ( LaAlO3) and Strontium-Titanate (SrTiO3) both materials are insulators and non-magnetic, while their interface has been observed to display ferromagnetism, high electrical conductivity and even superconductivity.
Tech
The battery life of implantable heart monitors must be improved to reduce the need for replacement and the risks this carries for patients, argue two senior doctors in The BMJ today.
Cardiologists John Dean and Neil Sulke say over half of patients with pacemakers will need new batteries and many need several replacements.
Not only is money wasted replacing batteries before they've expired, this "exposes patients to risk of serious complications, including life threatening infection," they warn.
Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have developed a new type of radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that is virtually impossible to hack.
If such chips were widely adopted, it could mean that an identity thief couldn't steal your credit card number or key card information by sitting next to you at a café, and high-tech burglars couldn't swipe expensive goods from a warehouse and replace them with dummy tags.
For years, retired Maj. David Underwood has noticed that whenever he drove under power lines and around other electromagnetic fields, he would feel a buzz in what remained of his arm. When traveling by car through Texas' open spaces, the buzz often became more powerful.
Researchers at North Carolina State University have discovered a new phase of the material boron nitride (Q-BN), which has potential applications for both manufacturing tools and electronic displays. The researchers have also developed a new technique for creating cubic boron nitride (c-BN) at ambient temperatures and air pressure, which has a suite of applications, including the development of advanced power grid technologies.
As a core communication device, the mobile phone is becoming increasingly popular in our daily lives. A wide variety of functional units and friendly operating systems make mobile phones eminently suitable for smart technological applications, and mobile phones have also attracted the interest of scientists.
At the atomic level, bismuth displays a number of quirky physical phenomena. A new study reveals a novel mechanism for controlling the energy transfer between electrons and the bismuth crystal lattice. Mastering this effect could, ultimately, help convert waste heat back into electricity, for example to improve the overall efficiency of solar cells. These findings have now been published in EPJ B by Piotr Chudzinski from Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Underrepresented students' first-semester GPA may be a better predictor of whether they'll graduate college than their ACT score or their family's socioeconomic status, a new study found.
The U.S. could soon decrease its dependence on importing valuable rare-earth elements that are widely used in many industries, according to a team of Penn State and U.S. Department of Energy researchers who found a cost-effective and environmentally friendly way to extract these metals from coal byproducts.
Using compost is the single best thing you can do to protect your family from any danger associated with lead in urban soils. Good compost will also guarantee that you will have plenty of vegetables to harvest.
That's the main finding of a paper appearing this month in the Journal of Environmental Quality. The University of Washington-led study looked at potential risks associated with growing vegetables in urban gardens and determined that the benefits of locally produced vegetables in cities outweigh any risks from gardening in contaminated soils.
University of Alaska Fairbanks mathematicians and glaciologists have taken a first step toward understanding how glacier ice flowing off Greenland affects sea levels.
Andy Aschwanden, Martin Truffer and Mark Fahnestock used mathematical computer models and field tests to reproduce the flow of 29 inlet glaciers fed by the Greenland ice sheet. They compared their data with data from NASA's Operation IceBridge North aerial campaign.
The comparisons showed that the computer models accurately depicted current flow conditions in topographically complex Greenland.
They're making fuel from thin air at the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute.
For the first time, researchers there have directly converted carbon dioxide from the air into methanol at relatively low temperatures.
Computer science has become a new basic skill, essential in order to excel in an increasingly computational and data-intensive world.
However, access to computer science (CS) at the K-12 levels remains limited. CS is taught in less than 25 percent of U.S. high schools. Rural and high-need schools are even less likely to offer it. Moreover, in schools that do offer CS, students of color and girls often participate in very low numbers.
But this is changing through a groundswell of interest in CS education at the state, city and local levels.
CLEVELAND--Fake or low-quality medicines and food supplements are an ongoing global problem in underdeveloped nations, although technology-savvy places, such as the United States, are also not immune.
A researcher at Case Western Reserve University is developing a low-cost, portable prototype designed to detect tainted medicines and food supplements that otherwise can make their way to consumers. The technology can authenticate good medicines and supplements.
The risk of a child breaking a bone can depend upon their ethnicity and where they live in the UK, according to a new study.
An analysis of the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink database by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton, found that rates of broken bones were higher in white children (150 per 10,000 children per year) compared to those amongst South Asian children (81 fractures per 10,000 children per year) and black children (64 fractures per 10,000 children per year).