Lifeboat Foundation

A University of Minnesota Twin Cities-led research team has solved a longstanding mystery surrounding strontium titanate, an unusual metal oxide that can be an insulator, a semiconductor, or a metal. The research provides insight for future applications of this material to electronic devices and data storage.

The paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When an insulator like strontium titanate is placed between oppositely charged metal plates, the electric field between the plates causes the negatively charged electrons and the positive nuclei to line up in the direction of the field. This orderly lining up of electrons and nuclei is resisted by thermal vibrations, and the degree of order is measured by a fundamental quantity called the dielectric constant. At low temperature, where the thermal vibrations are weak, the dielectric constant is larger.

Built using a 3D-printed framework and an Espressif ESP32, this modular lighting system can double as a display.

Hoag’s Object is a galaxy with an central region and a bright outer ring, but lacks any intervening material.

Continue reading “These NanoLeaf-Inspired Modular Lights Can Team Up to Create a Wall-Mounted Four-Digit Display” »

Hoag’s Object is a galaxy with an central region and a bright outer ring, but lacks any intervening material.

No. 7: With This Ring, I Thee Puzzle.

In 1950, astronomer Arthur Hoag came upon a tiny, faint, 16th-magnitude ring surrounding a ball-like center, and reasonably assumed it was a planetary nebula — a nearby puff of gas expelled from a single old-aged star. He also proposed an alternative and far more exotic explanation that this was an “Einstein Ring” from a faraway quasar. In this scenario, the quasar’s light is distorted into a halo by space-warping caused by a massive foreground spherical galaxy that it seems to surround. But later spectroscopic studies rejected this because the golden central ball and the blue ring have exactly the same redshift, indicating a whopping rush-away speed of 7,916 miles (12,740 kilometers) per second, which proves they’re both located exactly the same distance from us.

In this material, you will find strange objects, phenomena, and formations on the red planet. Some of them are explained and others remain mysterious to this day.

One of the most tedious, daunting tasks for undergraduate assistants in university research labs involves looking hours on end through a microscope at samples of material, trying to find monolayers.

These two-dimensional materials —less than 1/100,000th the width of a human hair—are highly sought for use in electronics, photonics, and optoelectronic devices because of their unique properties.

“Research labs hire armies of undergraduates to do nothing but look for monolayers,” says Jaime Cardenas, an assistant professor of optics at the University of Rochester. “It’s very tedious, and if you get tired, you might miss some of the monolayers or you might start making misidentifications.”

Photodetectors, sensors that can detect light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation, are essential components of imaging tools, communication systems, and various other technologies on the market. These sensors work by converting photons (i.e., light particles) into electrical current.

Researchers at Zhejiang University have recently developed a new photodetector that could detect light within a broader bandwidth. Their device, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, could be used to develop new and more advanced imaging technologies.

“Our recent project is based on traditional charge-coupled device (CCD) and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) imaging technologies,” Prof. Yang Xu, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Our novel imaging devices combining CCD’s MOS photogate for high sensitivity and CMOS’s independent pixel structure can significantly benefit monolithic integration, performance, and readout.”

From action heroes to villainous assassins, biohybrid robots made of both living and artificial materials have been at the center of many sci-fi fantasies, inspiring today’s robotic innovations. It’s still a long way until human-like robots walk among us in our daily lives, but scientists from Japan are bringing us one step closer by crafting living human skin on robots. The method developed, presented June 9 in the journal Matter, not only gave a robotic finger skin-like texture, but also water-repellent and self-healing functions.

“The finger looks slightly ‘sweaty’ straight out of the culture medium,” says first author Shoji Takeuchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan. “Since the finger is driven by an electric motor, it is also interesting to hear the clicking sounds of the motor in harmony with a finger that looks just like a real one.”

Continue reading “Scientists craft living human skin for robots” »

A recent experiment detailed in the journal Nature is challenging our picture of how electrons behave in quantum materials. Using stacked layers of a material called tungsten ditelluride, researchers have observed electrons in two-dimensions behaving as if they were in a single dimension—and in the process have created what the researchers assert is a new electronic state of matter.

“This is really a whole new horizon,” said Sanfeng Wu, assistant professor of physics at Princeton University and the senior author of the paper. “We were able to create a new electronic phase with this experiment—basically, a new type of metallic state.”

Our current understanding of the behavior of interacting electrons in metals can be described by a theory that works well with two-and three-dimensional systems, but breaks down when describing the interaction of electrons in a single dimension.

Did life begin on Earth, or did it come from space? Amino acids, peptides and proteins may have an off-world origin giving credence to panspermia.

Twenty amino acids discovered in the sample materials returned provide evidence to support the evolving panspermia hypothesis.