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WASHINGTON, Oct 16 (Reuters) — When British naturalist Charles Darwin sketched out his theory of evolution in the 1,859 book “On the Origin of Species” — proposing that biological species change over time through the acquisition of traits that favor survival and reproduction — it provoked a revolution in scientific thought.

Now 164 years later, nine scientists and philosophers on Monday proposed a new law of nature that includes the biological evolution described by Darwin as a vibrant example of a much broader phenomenon, one that appears at the level of atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more.

It holds that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected evidence for quartz nanocrystals in the high-altitude clouds of WASP-17 b, a hot Jupiter exoplanet 1,300 light-years from Earth.

The detection, which was uniquely possible with MIRI (Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument), marks the first time that silica (SiO₂) particles have been spotted in an exoplanet atmosphere.

The quartz crystals are only about 10 nanometers across, so small that 10,000 could fit side-by-side across a human hair. Their size and composition of pure silica were reported in “JWST-TST DREAMS: Quartz Clouds in the Atmosphere of WASP-17b,” published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have engineered a range of new single-walled transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) nanotubes with different compositions, chirality, and diameters by templating off boron-nitride nanotubes. They also realized ultra-thin nanotubes grown inside the template, and successfully tailored compositions to create a family of new nanotubes. The ability to synthesize a diverse range of structures offers unique insights into their growth mechanism and novel optical properties.

The work is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

The carbon nanotube is a wonder of nanotechnology. Made by rolling up an atomically thin sheet of carbon atoms, it has exceptional mechanical strength and electrical conductivity among a range of other exotic optoelectronic properties, with potential applications in semiconductors beyond the silicon age.

Scientists at the IBS Center for Quantum Nanoscience (QNS) at Ewha Womans University have accomplished a groundbreaking step forward in quantum information science. In partnership with teams from Japan, Spain, and the US, they created a novel electron-spin qubit platform, assembled atom.

An atom is the smallest component of an element. It is made up of protons and neutrons within the nucleus, and electrons circling the nucleus.

Super ionic water ice 18 ice 19… proven to withstand temperatures many thousands degrees Fahrenheit in the lab is believed to be present in planets like Uranus and Neptune and contributes to the generation of Wonky, multi-polar magnetic fields…

Odd things happen inside planets, where familiar materials are subjected to extreme pressures and heat.

Iron atoms probably dance within Earth’s solid inner core, and hot, black, heavy ice – that’s both solid and liquid at the same time – likely forms within the water-rich gas giants, Uranus and Neptune.

Continue reading “Strange Form of Ice Found That Only Melts at Extremely Hot Temperatures” »

“These simulations do not allow you to go back and alter your past, but they do allow you to create a better tomorrow by fixing yesterday’s problems today.”

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have demonstrated.

Quantum entanglement is a fundamental and intriguing phenomenon in quantum mechanics. It occurs when two or more particles become correlated in such a way that the state of one particle cannot be described independently of the state of the other(s), even when they are separated by large… More.

Continue reading “Scientists use quantum entanglement to travel in time” »

For his work on techniques to generate quantum dots of uniform size and color, Bawendi is honored along with Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov.

Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a leader in the development of tiny particles known as quantum dots, has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2023. He will share the prize with Louis Brus of Columbia University and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology, Inc.

The researchers were honored for their work in discovering and synthesizing quantum dots — tiny particles of matter that emit exceptionally pure light. In its announcement this morning, the Nobel Foundation cited Bawendi for work that “revolutionized the chemical production of quantum dots, resulting in almost perfect particles.”

In a move that echoes a sci-fi series, researchers have developed a super-small material that was able to not only stimulate nerves in rodents, but reconnect them as well. The finding could lead to injectable particles that take the place of larger implants.

In creating the particles, researchers at Rice University started with two layers of a metallic glass alloy called Metglas and wedged a piezoelectric layer of lead zirconium titanate in between them. Piezoelectric materials generate electricity when they have mechanical forces applied to them. Metglas is a magnetostrictive material, which means it changes its shape when it has a magnetic field applied to it. In this case, the change in shape of the Metglas in the presence of magnetic pulses caused the piezoelectric material inside to generate an electrical signal. Materials that do this are known as magnetoelectric.

“We asked, ‘Can we create a material that can be like dust or is so small that by placing just a sprinkle of it inside the body you’d be able to stimulate the brain or nervous system?’” said lead author Joshua Chen, a Rice doctoral alumnus. “With that question in mind, we thought that magnetoelectric materials were ideal candidates for use in neurostimulation. They respond to magnetic fields, which easily penetrate into the body, and convert them into electric fields – a language our nervous system already uses to relay information.”

The Higgs field is famous for its role bestowing mass on other particles. But it isn’t a one-way relationship: The Higgs field’s interactions also influence its own particle, the Higgs boson. Due to this give-and-take, some physicists think the Higgs boson should be approximately as heavy as the biggest mass scale with which it interacts, the Planck scale.

But this isn’t the case. The Planck scale sits at the enormous energies at which it is thought that gravity becomes as strong as the other three fundamental forces, around 10¹⁹ gigaelectronvolts. This is many orders of magnitude bigger than the actual Higgs mass of 125 GeV.

How can the gap between expectation and reality be so huge? Is something protecting the Higgs from Planck-scale physics? The large, unexpected difference in these two scales is known as the hierarchy problem.