IN A NUTSHELL 🔬 Scientists have created a swarm of tiny robots that function as a dynamic, living material. 🧬 Inspired by embryonic development, these robots can change shape, self-heal, and adapt like smart materials. 💡 Equipped with light sensors and magnets, the robots coordinate their movements to transition between solid and liquid states. 🏗️
A project led by the University of Melbourne’s Dr. Manjith Bose and Professor Jeff McCallum, who are also members of the ARC Center of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, has identified a promising class of superconductors that may potentially avoid the need for high levels of cryogenic cooling. These advanced materials can be manufactured, be integrable and be compatible using standard silicon and superconducting electronics approaches.
To optimize the growth of these silicide superconductors, Dr. Bose and Prof. McCallum are making extensive use of high–temperature neutron reflectometry on the Spatz reflectometer at ANSTO’s Australian Center for Neutron Scattering.
Neutrons are an ideal tool for exploring extreme sample environments, such as the high pressure, temperatures or fields that are present when manufacturing circuit elements. This is because neutrons can penetrate through most common metals, allowing one to see reflective thin films deep inside furnaces, magnets and cryo-chambers.
Pounding on the bottom of a glass bottle of ketchup is one of life’s small annoyances. Getting that sweet, red concoction from its solid phase to a liquid takes too long when you’re hungry and could even require messy strategies with a butter knife.
Now a team of scientists has shown that determining the point where the solid transitions to a liquid can be predicted from the properties of the solid phase alone. The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
The new work focuses on yielding, a phenomenon where a solid-like material starts to behave like a liquid. “This behavior occurs constantly all around us, from desserts like custards that smoothly flow onto your spoon to personal care products like toothpaste that are easily squeezed out of tubes but hold their shape on your toothbrush,” Ryan Poling-Skutvik of the University of Rhode Island in the United States told Phys.org.
As the digital world demands greater data storage and faster access times, magnetic memory technologies have emerged as a promising frontier. However, conventional magnetic memory devices have an inherent limitation: they use electric currents to generate the magnetic fields necessary to reverse their stored magnetization, leading to energy losses in the form of heat.
This inefficiency has pushed researchers to explore approaches that could further reduce power consumption in magnetic memories while maintaining or even enhancing their performance.
Multiferroic materials, which exhibit both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties, have long been considered potential game changers for next-generation memory devices.
