Lifeboat Foundation

A research team led by Prof. Chen Xianhui from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), collaborating with the team led by Prof. Sun Jian from Nanjing University, realized a new high superconducting transition temperature of 36 K in elemental materials under high pressure. Their study was published in Physical Review Letters.

Elemental materials provide clean and fundamental platforms for studying superconductivity. Since the discovery of superconductivity in the element mercury by Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911, more than 50 elements in total have been found to show superconductivity under atmospheric environments or high pressures. However, most elements have low superconducting critical temperatures (T_c), with the highest previous elemental T_c of 26 K being achieved by elemental titanium (Ti) at high pressures.

Previous studies revealed that elemental scandium (Sc) undergoes four structural phase transitions under pressure. Due to the limitations of early high-pressure experimental techniques, mysteries of the superconductivity of elemental Sc at higher pressures have yet to be untangled.

Microscopic cracks vanish in experiments, revealing possibility of self-healing machines.

In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists have for the first time observed metal spontaneously healing its microscopic cracks, upending traditional material theories. This observation could lead to self-healing machines, significantly enhancing their safety and lifespan. The phenomenon, confirming a theory proposed in 2013, may pave the way for an engineering revolution, though further research is necessary to fully understand its practical applicability.

Discovery of Self-healing Metal Phenomenon.

The ancient Romans were master builders and engineers, perhaps most famously represented by the still-functional aqueducts. And those architectural marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable material that gave Roman structures their incredible strength.

Even today, one of their structures – the Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000 years old – holds the record for the world’s largest dome of unreinforced concrete.

The properties of this concrete have generally been attributed to its ingredients: pozzolana, a mix of volcanic ash – named after the Italian city of Pozzuoli, where a significant deposit of it can be found – and lime. When mixed with water, the two materials can react to produce strong concrete.

A breakthrough study by the University of Washington.

Founded in 1,861, the University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, with additional campuses in Tacoma and Bothell. Classified as an R1 Doctoral Research University classification under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, UW is a member of the Association of American Universities.

Here, the authors report the realization of WSe2 Schottky junction field-effect transistors with asymmetric multi-layer graphene and WTe2 van der Waals contacts, enabling reconfigurable polarity, low off-state currents, near-ideal rectifying behaviour and bipolar photovoltaic response.

KAUST

This is according to a press release by the institution published on Sunday.

The prime contractor for the memorial was Morrison Monuments which has experience creating large-scale civic memorials of various shapes and sizes. Based out of Bellbrook, Ohio, Morrison Monuments was responsible for producing the four individual aircraft obelisks with wording and graphics, the center dedication obelisk, the concrete pad on which the memorial stands, the aircraft models and poles, and installing the memorial at the NMUSAF. A subcontractor, Spradlin Brothers of Springfield, Ohio, made the aircraft models.

In total, the project cost The Pioneers of Stealth $254,350, which the group was able to raise via internal fundraising. $234,850 of that total went towards the Morrison Monuments contract, while the remaining $19,500 has been paid to the Air Force Museum Foundation for “perpetual care” of the monument.

Plans for the memorial have been several years in the making. Back in early 2021, The Pioneers of Stealth initiated the ‘concept exploration’ phase for the memorial — during which members’ design concepts and inscription ideas were submitted for review by a special memorial committee. While the location for the memorial was already agreed upon, the design, graphics, and aircraft models to feature still needed to be narrowed down. The deadline for the first round of members’ entries was July 4, 2021.

A proton-driven approach that enables multiple ferroelectric phase transitions sets the stage for ultralow power, high-capacity computer chips.

A proton-mediated approach that produces multiple phase transitions in ferroelectric materials could help develop high-performance memory devices, such as brain-inspired, or neuromorphic, computing chips, a KAUST-led international team has found. The paper is published in the journal Science Advances.

Ferroelectrics, such as indium selenide, are intrinsically polarized materials that switch polarity when placed in an electric field, which makes them attractive for creating memory technologies. In addition to requiring low operating voltages, the resulting memory devices display excellent maximum read/write endurance and write speeds, but their storage capacity is low. This is because existing methods can only trigger a few ferroelectric phases, and capturing these phases is experimentally challenging, says Xin He, who co-led the study under the guidance of Fei Xue and Xixiang Zhang.

Footage of thousands of tiny metal spheres set jiggling in a shallow tray has revealed an arrangement of particles once considered impossible.

A team of physicists from the University of Paris-Saclay in France has observed an unusual combination of order and chaos known as a ‘quasicrystal’ emerging spontaneously in a granular material on a millimeter-scale for the first time.

If there is beauty in order, crystals are the very manifestation of elegance and attraction.