Articles - QESP
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.
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.
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.
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.
By University of California - Berkeley
- Thursday, February 25th, 2021
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. They demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair, small enough to be placed on computer chips.
By Cornell University
- Monday, February 22nd, 2021
Cornell University scientists have identified a new contender when it comes to quantum materials for computing and low-temperature electronics.
Using nitride-based materials, the researchers created a material structure that simultaneously exhibits superconductivity — in which electrical resistance vanishes completely — and the quantum Hall effect, which produces resistance with extreme precision when a magnetic field is applied.
By University of New South Wales
- Thursday, February 4th, 2021
Chemical engineers at UNSW Sydney have found a way to make ‘green’ ammonia from air, water and renewable electricity that does not require the high temperatures, high pressure and huge infrastructure currently needed to produce this essential compound.
By Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- Wednesday, January 20th, 2021
Over the past 20 years, scientists have been developing metamaterials, or materials that don’t occur naturally and whose mechanical properties result from their designed structure rather than their chemical composition. They allow researchers to create materials with specific properties and shapes. Metamaterials are still not widely used in everyday objects, but that could soon change. Tian Chen, a post-doc at two EPFL labs — the Flexible Structures Laboratory, headed by Pedro Reis, and the Geometric Computing Laboratory, headed by Mark Pauly — has taken metamaterials one step further, developing one whose mechanical properties can be reprogrammed after the material has been made. His research appears in Nature.
By Ted Smillie
- Sunday, January 10th, 2021
It seems Trump’s failed attack on US democracy is insignificant when compared to previous successful US Government attacks on US and third world democracies. Here are some examples:
“In 1965, with the aid of weapons and intelligence from the United States, Suharto hunted down and killed between 500,000 and a million of Sukarno’s supporters in one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”
“The US felt it had no choice but to shift to a more aggressive stance and resorted to the tactic they had used in Guatemala and Indonesia – the good old-fashioned coup. It was executed on 11 September 1973, by General Augusto Pinochet with CIA support under the code name Operation Fubelt.
By Technical University of Denmark
- Tuesday, December 15th, 2020
Methods currently used around the world for predicting the development of COVID-19 and other pandemics fail to report precisely on the best and worst case scenarios. Newly developed prediction method for epidemics, published in Nature Physics, solve this problem.
“It is about understanding best and worst-case scenarios — and the fact that worst case is one of the most important things to keep track of when navigating through pandemics — regardless whether it be in Denmark, the EU, the USA or the WHO. If you are only presented with an average estimate for the development of an epidemic — not knowing how bad it possible can get, then it is difficult to act politically,” says Professor Sune Lehmann, one of four authors of the article Fixed-time descriptive statistics underestimate extremes of epidemic curve ensembles just published in Nature Physics.
