Lifeboat Foundation

Most craters are circular in shape due to material ejecting out in all directions as a result of an impact. Below is a group of impact craters in Noachis Terra, a large region in Mars’ southern hemisphere. These are all classified as simple craters, which are small bowl-shaped, smooth-walled craters.

Complex craters, on the other hand, are large craters with complicated features, such as terraces, central peaks, and rims and walls their own features. Oblong craters, like the one in the lead image — which is also located in Noachis Terra — can sometimes be created by impacts striking the surface at a very low grazing angle.

Proteins are promising molecular materials for next-generation electronic devices. Here, the authors fabricated printable digital logic circuits comprising resistors and diodes from self-assembled photosystem I complexes that enable pulse modulation.

Researchers have created one-way superconductivity, paving the way for superconductors to supersede semiconductors in electronics.

Engineers at MIT have developed an ultra-thin speaker that could be used to make entire surfaces produce sound. The unique design should be energy efficient and easy to produce at scale, the team says.

In a basic sense, speakers work by vibrating a membrane, which manipulates the air above it to produce sound waves. In speakers commonly found in audio systems or headphones, that’s done using electrical currents and magnetic fields.

Continue reading “Ultra-thin speakers roll out like wallpaper for sound-blasting surfaces” »

Saturn’s moon Titan looks very much like Earth from space, with rivers, lakes, and seas filled by rain tumbling through a thick atmosphere. While these landscapes may look familiar, they are composed of materials that are undoubtedly different—liquid methane streams streak Titan’s icy surface and nitrogen winds build hydrocarbon sand dunes.

The presence of these materials—whose mechanical properties are vastly different from those of silicate-based substances that make up other known sedimentary bodies in our solar system—makes Titan’s landscape formation enigmatic. By identifying a process that would allow for hydrocarbon-based substances to form sand grains or bedrock depending on how often winds blow and streams flow, Stanford University geologist Mathieu Lapôtre and his colleagues have shown how Titan’s distinct dunes, plains, and labyrinth terrains could be formed.

Titan, which is a target for space exploration because of its potential habitability, is the only other body in our solar system known to have an Earth-like, seasonal liquid transport cycle today. The new model, published in Geophysical Research Letters April 25, shows how that seasonal cycle drives the movement of grains over the moon’s surface.

Researchers at the University of Freiburg have worked with colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley to come up with a novel means of rapidly 3D printing complex glass parts at a microscopic scale.

Known as ‘Microscale Computed Axial Lithography’ (Micro-CAL), this approach involves exposing resin to 2D light images of a desired shape from multiple angles, which when they overlap, trigger polymerization. When used to print the Glassomer material previously honed at Freiburg, the team say their layer-free process has the potential to unlock devices with new microfluidic or micro-optical functionality.

“For the first time, we were able to print glass with structures in the range of 50 micrometers in just a few minutes, which corresponds roughly to the thickness of a hair,” explains the University of Freiburg’s Dr. Frederik Kotz-Helmer. The ability to manufacture such components at high speed and with great geometric freedom will enable new functions and more cost-effective products in the future.”

NASA scientists have invented a new metal alloy that is 1,000 times more durable than current state-of-the-art materials used in aviation and space exploration.

The US space agency believes that Alloy GRX-810 could revolutionise space travel, as it can withstand far harsher conditions than existing materials used within rocket engines.

The material has twice the strength, three-and-a-half times the flexibility and more than 1,000 times the durability under stress at high temperatures.