Physical Sciences
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced a competition to create an Advanced Materials Center of Excellence to foster interdisciplinary collaborations between NIST researchers and scientists and engineers from academia and industry.
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Berkeley Lab’s new extreme-ultraviolet microscope to help drive innovation in chip making.
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Chemical engineering researchers Wei Fan, Paul Dauenhauer and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report this week that they’ve discovered a new chemical process to make p-xylene, an important ingredient of common plastics, at 90 percent yield from lignocellulosic biomass, the highest yield achieved to date.
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An international team of astronomers has found that a nearby star previously thought to host two or three planets is in fact orbited by six or seven worlds, including an unprecedented three to five “super-Earths” in its habitable zone, where conditions could be right for life.
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Using clouds of ultra-cold atoms and a pair of lasers operating at optical wavelengths, researchers have reached a quantum network milestone: entangling light with an optical atomic coherence composed of interacting atoms in two different states. The development could help pave the way for functional, multi-node quantum networks.
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University of Adelaide researchers are developing a new type of laser system that will monitor methane, the main component of natural gas, levels across large areas. This will provide a useful tool for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions.
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For decades, electronic devices have been getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. It’s now possible—even routine—to place millions of transistors on a single silicon chip. But transistors based on semiconductors can only get so small.
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The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced June 24 that it plans to establish a new Advanced Materials Center of Excellence to facilitate collaborations between NIST and researchers from academia and industry on advanced materials development.
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Improved methods for breaking down cellulose nanofibers are central to cost-effective biofuel production.
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The European Space Agency is set to develop a new Earth-observing satellite that will map and monitor global forests, providing an unprecedented level of detail and understanding to the role forests play in the global carbon cycle and potential climate change.
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At first glance the beautifully bound 1797 Luigi Cherubini opera Médée looks like an impeccably preserved relic of opera's golden age. However, flip to the final pages of the aria "Du trouble affreux qui me dévore" ("The terrible disorder that consumes me") and you see the problem: Thick smudges of carbon completely black out the closing lines.
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Tiny implants to monitor bodily functions or to provide insulin or any other drug based on immediate need would be an advancement in personalized medicine, but a problem inherent in implants is the tendency of the human immune system to recognize the device as an invader and encapsulate it, preventing the device from doing its job.
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