Lifeboat Foundation

Life comes in all shapes in sizes, but some sizes are more popular than others, new research from the University of British Columbia (UBC) has found.

In the first study of its kind published today (March 29) in PLOS ONE, Dr. Eden Tekwa, who conducted the study as a postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s department of zoology, surveyed the body sizes of all Earth’s living organisms, and uncovered an unexpected pattern. Contrary to what current theories can explain, our planet’s biomass—the material that makes up all living organisms—is concentrated in organisms at either end of the size spectrum.

“The smallest and largest organisms significantly outweigh all other organisms,” said Dr. Tekwa, lead author of “The size of life,” and now a research associate with McGill University’s department of biology. “This seems like a new and emerging pattern that needs to be explained, and we don’t have theories for how to explain it right now. Current theories predict that biomass would be spread evenly across all body sizes.”

Li-ion batteries power almost everything these days, but their star is waning as more promising chemistries are developed. Scientists at the Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien) in Austria have invented a new battery type that uses abundant materials. The Oxygen-ion battery is cheap to produce and can last forever.

Nickelates are a material class that has excited scientists because of its recently discovered superconducting ability, and now a new study led by Cornell has changed where scientists thought this ability might originate, providing a blueprint for how more functional versions might be engineered in the future.

Superconductivity was predicted in nickel-based oxide compounds, or nickelates, more than 20 years ago, yet only realized experimentally for the first time in 2019, and only in samples that are grown as very thin, crystalline films—less than 20 nanometers thick—layered on a supporting substrate material.

Researchers worldwide have been working to better understand the microscopic details and origins of superconductivity in nickelates in an effort to create samples that successfully superconduct in macroscopic “bulk” crystalline form, but have yet to be successful. This limitation led some researchers to speculate that superconductivity was not being hosted in the nickelate film, but rather at the atomic interface where the film and substrate meet.

BNSF said about 22 rail cars carrying mixed freight, including ethanol and corn syrup, derailed at 1:02 a.m. local time Thursday. Four rail cars caught fire, the BNSF said. There are no other hazardous materials on the train and no injuries were reported, the company said.

“BNSF personnel are responding to assess the derailment site and will be working closely with local first responders,” company spokesperson Lena Kent said in a statement.

University of Pittsburgh.

A metamaterial is any material engineered to have a property that is elusive to naturally occurring materials. The research introduces the use of metamaterials in the creation of concrete, providing the option to alter its brittleness, flexibility, and shapeability to allow builders to use less of the material without sacrificing strength or longevity.

Researchers use an optical vortex beam to create a stable pattern of electron spins in a thin layer of semiconductor material.

Spin-based electronic, or “spintronic,” devices can benefit from techniques that coax electron spins into static spatial patterns called spin textures. A new experiment demonstrates that an optical vortex—a light beam that carries orbital angular momentum—can generate a stable spin texture in a semiconductor [1]. The research team showed that the vortex generates a pattern of stripes that has potential uses in processing spin information. Previous experiments have optically stimulated these striped textures, but the optical vortex has a structure that approximately overlaps with the stripe pattern, allowing faster spin-texture formation.

The spins of unbound electrons in a material can be aligned by a magnetic field or by polarized light. But as these electrons move—either through diffusion or through conduction—their spins will begin to rotate in response to so-called spin-orbit interactions within the material. The direction and rate of these rotations for any given electron depend on the path that it takes. Thus, two nearby electrons that start out aligned will become misaligned as they move along different paths, even if they arrive at the same destination. So maintaining an electronic spin texture seems like a doomed enterprise.

Graphene is one of the strongest materials. On top of that, it is exceptionally good at conducting heat and electrical currents, making it one of the most special and versatile materials we know. For all these reasons, the discovery of graphene was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010.

Yet, many properties of the material and its cousins are still poorly understood—for the simple reason that the atoms they are made up of are very difficult to observe. A team of researchers from the University of Amsterdam and New York University have now found a surprising way to solve this issue.

Two-dimensional materials, consisting of a hyper-thin single layer of atomic crystal, have attracted a lot of attention recently. This well-deserved attention is mainly due to their unusual properties, very different from their three-dimensional ‘bulk’ counterparts. Graphene, the most famous representative, and many other two-dimensional materials, are nowadays researched intensely in the laboratory.

Using their non-invasive sensors, Professor Francesca Iacopi from the University of Technology Sydney and her colleagues have demonstrated hands-free communication with a quadruped robot through brain activity.

A semirigid stamp and a standard photolithography mask-aligner enable a reliable and scalable pickup and release process for van der Waals materials integration at the wafer scale.