Tech
Researchers at Tohoku University have announced the development of a new magnetic tunnel junction, by which the team has demonstrated an extended retention time for digital information without an increase of the active power consumption.
A better understanding of terrestrial flux dynamics will come from elucidating the integrated effects of climate and vegetation constraints on gross primary productivity (GPP), ecosystem respiration (ER), and net ecosystem productivity (NEP), according to Dr. Shutao Chen, Associate professor at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology.
An international collaboration led by scientists at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) , Japan, has developed a two-step method to more efficiently break down carbohydrates into their single sugar components, a critical process in producing green fuel.
The researchers published their results on April 10th in the American Chemical Society journal, Industrial & Engineering Chemical Research.
As the saying goes, nothing lasts forever. The laws of physics confirm this: on our planet, all processes increase entropy, thus molecular disorder. For example, a broken glass would never put itself back together again.
Theoretical physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems have discovered that things which seem inconceivable in the everyday world are possible on a microscopic level.
As mysterious as the Italian scientist for which it is named, the Majorana particle is one of the most compelling quests in physics.
Its fame stems from its strange properties - it is the only particle that is its own antiparticle - and from its potential to be harnessed for future quantum computing.
In recent years, a handful of groups including a team at Princeton have reported finding the Majorana in various materials, but the challenge is how to manipulate it for quantum computation.
The carbon dioxide (CO2) produced when fossil fuels are burned is normally released into the atmosphere. Researchers working on synthetic fuels - also known as carbon-neutral fuels - are exploring ways to capture and recycle that CO2. At EPFL, this research is spearheaded by a team led by Professor Xile Hu at the Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Catalysis (LSCI).
Long-term hemodialysis is a lifesaver for approximately half a million patients in the United States with kidney failure (also known as end-stage renal disease, or ESRD) who are either waiting on or unsuitable for a kidney transplant. But before the external machinery can take over the function of the kidneys -- filtering and cleansing wastes from the blood -- a minor surgical procedure is needed to create a stable, functional and reusable access to the circulatory system, usually through blood vessels in the arm.
DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke University scientists have given us another way to tell which endangered lemur species are most at risk from deforestation -- based on the trillions of bacteria that inhabit their guts.
In a new study, researchers compared the gut microbes of 12 lemur species across the island of Madagascar, where thousands of acres of forest are cleared each year to make way for crops and pastures.
The team found that some lemurs harbor microbes that are more specialized than others for the forests where they live, to help lemurs digest their leafy diets.
A new method of discovering materials using data analytics and electron microscopy has found a new class of extremely hard alloys. Such materials could potentially withstand severe impact from projectiles, thereby providing better protection of soldiers in combat. Researchers from Lehigh University describe the method and findings in an article, "Materials Informatics For the Screening of Multi-Principal Elements and High-Entropy Alloys," that appears today in Nature Communications.
Tropical Cyclone Vayu's eye was just off the western coast of India when the NOAA-20 satellite passed overhead and captured a visible image of the storm.
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the NOAA-20 polar orbiting satellite provided a visible image of the storm. The VIIRS image revealed an eye surrounded by powerful thunderstorms. However, the majority of the strongest storms appeared to be displaced southwest of the eye.
Free fingers have many obvious advantages on land, such as in locomotion and grasping, while webbed fingers are typical of aquatic or gliding animals. But both amphibians and amniotes--which include mammals, reptiles, and birds--can have webbed digits. In new research from Japan, scientists show for the first time that during embryo development, some animal species detect the presence of atmospheric oxygen, which triggers removal of interdigital webbing. Their research appears June 13 in the journal Developmental Cell.
Countless textbooks have characterized bacteria as simple, disorganized blobs of molecules.
Now, using advanced technologies to explore the inner workings of bacteria in unprecedented detail, biologists at the University of California San Diego have discovered that in fact bacteria have more in common with sophisticated human cells than previously known.
Green bodies' porous structure, i.e. mesostructure, affects dramatically the functional parameters of the optical ceramics obtained by reactive sintering. Characteristics of the mesostructure are proposed to regulate by pre-annealing of green bodies at temperatures below the phase formation and consolidation. The approach was presented in the article published in Journal of the European Ceramic Society.
Single-molecule break junction techniques offer unique insights into the charge transport at the molecular level. The conductance through single-molecule junction consists of the through-space tunneling and the through-molecule tunneling conductance. However, the existence of through-space tunneling, which is ubiquitous at the single-molecule level, makes the quantitative extraction of the intrinsic molecular signals challenging.
The discovery of the extremely high superconducting temperature (Tc) of ~200 K reported in the sulfur hydride system above 100 GPa, has broken the high-temperature superconductivity record for the copper oxides. The zero resistance superconducting measurements of sulfur hydride system have been reported by Eremets et al.. Direct, complete and many pressure-point Meissner effect measurements under high pressures are urgently needed. Motivated by this, the research group of Prof.