Nuclear terrorism could be intercepted by neutron-gamma detector that pinpoints source

By KTH, Royal Institute of Technology - Wednesday, May 19th, 2021

Scanning technology aimed at detecting small amounts of nuclear materials was unveiled by scientists in Sweden today, with the hope of preventing acts of nuclear terrorism.

Bo Cederwall, a professor of physics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, says the technology can be used in airports and seaports for routine inspection of passengers and goods. The research is published and featured in the journals Science Advances and Science, respectively.

DNA robots designed in minutes instead of days

By Ohio State University - Monday, April 19th, 2021

Someday, scientists believe, tiny DNA-based robots and other nanodevices will deliver medicine inside our bodies, detect the presence of deadly pathogens, and help manufacture increasingly smaller electronics. Researchers took a big step toward that future by developing a new tool that can design much more complex DNA robots and nanodevices than were ever possible before in a fraction of the time.

More than 5000 tons of extraterrestrial dust fall to Earth each year

By CNRS - Thursday, April 8th, 2021

Every year, our planet encounters dust from comets and asteroids. These interplanetary dust particles pass through our atmosphere and give rise to shooting stars. Some of them reach the ground in the form of micrometeorites. An international program conducted for nearly 20 has determined that 5,200 tons per year of these micrometeorites reach the ground.

Quantum quirk yields giant magnetic effect, where none should exist

By Rice University - Friday, February 26th, 2021

In a twist befitting the strange nature of quantum mechanics, physicists have discovered the Hall effect — a characteristic change in the way electricity is conducted in the presence of a magnetic field — in a nonmagnetic quantum material to which no magnetic field was applied.

The discovery by researchers from Rice University, Austria’s Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute and Canada’s McMaster University is detailed in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Of interest are both the origins of the effect, which is typically associated with magnetism, and its gigantic magnitude — more than 1,000 times larger than one might observe in simple semiconductors.