Lifeboat Foundation

A nearby star system is helping astronomers unravel the mystery of how water appeared in our solar system billions of years ago.

Scientists observed a young star, called V883 Orionis, located 1,300 light-years away using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes, or ALMA, in northern Chile.

The star is surrounded by a planet-forming disk of cloud of gas and dust leftover from when the star was born. Eventually, material in the disk comes together to form comets, asteroids and planets over millions of years.

Some algae glow blue when they experience forces. Held in transparent plastic, they now make devices light up in response to gentle pushes and tugs.

A growing number of firms are turning fungi roots into clothing and building material.

Researchers at Kyushu University, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and Osaka University in Japan have recently introduced a new strategy for synthesizing multi-layer hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), a material that could be used to integrate different 2D materials in electronic devices, while preserving their unique properties. Their proposed approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Electronics, could facilitate the fabrication of new highly performing graphene-based devices.

“The atomically flat 2D insulator hBN is a key material for the integration of 2D materials into electronic devices,” Hiroki Ago, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “For example, the highest carrier mobility in monolayer graphene is achieved only when it is sandwiched by multilayer hBN. Superconductivity observed in twisted bilayer graphene also needs multilayer hBN to isolate from environment.”

In addition to its value for fabricating graphene-based devices, hBN can also be used to integrate transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) in devices, achieving strong photoluminescence and high carrier mobility. It can also be valuable for conducting studies focusing on moiré physics.

MANUFACTURA’s eggshell project transforms organic waste into a sustainable building material made from 3D printed eggshells.

Researchers from Southwest University in China have constructed the entire chromosomal-scale genome assembly and complete spidroin gene set of the golden orb-weaving spider, Trichonephila clavata, known for its especially strong, golden-colored webs.

They attest that their work “Provides multidimensional data that significantly expand the knowledge of spider dragline silk generation…” and the researchers plan on using this new “molecular atlas” to better understand how spiders manufacture their silk.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the paper details the steps the researchers took, from wild spider capture to multiomic analysis, in revealing the interplay of genes within the spider’s major ampullate gland, the gland responsible for producing dragline silk.

A new RMIT-led international collaboration published in February has uncovered, for the first time, a distinct disorder-driven bosonic superconductor-insulator transition.

The discovery outlines a global picture of the giant anomalous Hall effect and reveals its correlation with the unconventional charge density wave in the AV₃Sb₅ kagome metal family, with potential applications in future ultra-low energy electronics.

Superconductors, which can transmit electricity without energy dissipation, hold great promise for the development of future low-energy electronics technologies, and are already applied in diverse fields such as hover trains and high-strength magnets (such as medical MRIs).

After testing several different types of grass and other raw materials, Plantd settled on a perennial (meaning it grows back every year and doesn’t need to be re-planted) long grass that can grow 20 to 30 feet in a year.

Though grass is obviously softer than wood, it contains a similar cellulose fiber that can be broken down then reconstituted and engineered in such a way that the final product is even stronger than wood (check out this video that made the rounds on LinkedIn last year: a regular wood panel and a Plantd panel are subjected to a sledgehammer, and just one of the two withstands the test).

Continue reading “This Startup Is Making Ultra-Strong Building Panels Out of Grass” »

Imagine a sheet of material just one layer of atoms thick—less than a millionth of a millimeter. While this may sound fantastical, such a material exists: it is called graphene and it is made from carbon atoms in a honeycomb arrangement. First synthesized in 2004 and then soon hailed as a substance with wondrous characteristics, scientists are still working on understanding it.

Postdoc Areg Ghazaryan and Professor Maksym Serbyn at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) together with colleagues Dr. Tobias Holder and Professor Erez Berg from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have been studying graphene for years and have now published their newest findings on its superconducting properties in a research paper in the journal Physical Review B.

“Multilayered graphene has many promising qualities ranging from widely tunable band structure and special optical properties to new forms of superconductivity—meaning being able to conduct electrical current without resistance,” Ghazaryan explains.