news 2013

Researchers demonstrate new way to sustain high-performance fusion plasmas Posted December 3, 2013; 11:00 a.m. by John Greenwald, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory A multinational team led by Chinese researchers in collaboration with U.S. and European partners has successfully demonstrated a novel technique for suppressing instabilities that can cut short the life of controlled fusion reactions.

Listen up nickel-titanium and all you other shape-memory alloys, there's a new kid on the block that just claimed the championship for elasticity and is primed to take over the shape memory apps market at the nanoscale. A research team at Berkeley Lab has discovered a way to introduce a recoverable strain into bismuth ferrite of up to 14-percent on the nanoscale, larger than any shape-memory effect observed in a metal.

In magneto-electric materials, electric and magnetic vibrations can be coupled to "electromagnons". High hopes are placed on this technology, a breakthrough could now be achieved at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien).

Crushed by habitat loss and poaching, Asian elephants are at risk, and their future rests heavily on captive breeding programs. A collaborative study between Cornell and Smithsonian scientists has found a key clue to why these programs have been difficult to manage. Published in the journal PLOS-ONE in August, their findings could transform how sperm is collected to preserve this endangered species.

Synthetic polymers coating a nanoparticle surface can recognize specific molecules just like an antibody. MIT chemical engineers have developed a novel way to generate nanoparticles that can recognize specific molecules, opening up a new approach to building durable sensors for many different compounds, among other applications.

Professor Dan Shechtman celebrated crystallography's profound impact on modern science in the Bragg Centenary Lecture 2013 - and explained how he overturned one of the discipline's key principles. Professor Shechtman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011, spoke in the University’s Rupert Beckett Lecture Theatre on November 21 at the culmination of a year of events marking the centenary of the development of X-ray crystallography by William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg at Leeds in 1912-13.

A unique inside look at the electronic structure of a highly touted metal-organic framework (MOF) as it is adsorbing carbon dioxide gas should help in the design of new and improved MOFs for carbon capture and storage. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have recorded the first in situ electronic structure observations of the adsorption of carbon dioxide inside Mg-MOF-74, an open metal site MOF that has emerged as one of the most promising strategies for capturing and storing greenhouse gases.

In our universe there are particle accelerators 40 million times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Scientists don't know what these cosmic accelerators are or where they are located, but new results being reported from "IceCube," the neutrino observatory buried at the South Pole, may show the way.

A new study by Stanford scientists overturns a widely held explanation for how organic photovoltaics turn sunlight into electricity. Organic solar cells have long been touted as lightweight, low-cost alternatives to rigid solar panels made of silicon. Dramatic improvements in the efficiency of organic photovoltaics have been made in recent years, yet the fundamental question of how these devices convert sunlight into electricity is still hotly debated.

19 November 2013 A University of Sydney researcher's proposal has led to a new world record for the largest quantum 'circuit board' ever produced - an essential component for a quantum computer made of laser light. The international collaboration with the University of Tokyo and the Australian National University has seen the largest number of quantum systems brought together in a single component jump from 14 to 10,000.

New work by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, could soon transform the building blocks of modern computing by making nanomagnetic switches a viable replacement for the conventional transistors found in nearly every computer. Semiconductor-based transistors, the on-off switches that direct the flow of electricity and form a computer's nervous system, have been consuming greater chunks of power at increasingly hotter temperatures as processing speeds grow.

AUSTIN, Texas — Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a simple scaling theory to estimate gas production from hydraulically fractured wells in the Barnett Shale. The method is intended to help the energy industry accurately identify lowand high-producing horizontal wells, as well as accurately predict how long it will take for gas reserves to deplete in the wells.

New work by researchers at UC Berkeley could soon transform the building blocks of modern electronics by making nanomagnetic switches a viable replacement for the conventional transistors found in all computers. Semiconductor-based transistors, the on-off switches that direct the flow of electricity and form a computer's nervous system, have been consuming greater chunks of power at increasingly hotter temperatures as processing speeds grow.

Understanding superconductivity - whereby certain materials can conduct electricity without any loss of energy - has proved to be one of the most persistent problems in modern physics. Scientists have struggled for decades to develop a cohesive theory of superconductivity, largely spurred by the game-changing prospect of creating a superconductor that works at room temperature, but it has proved to be a tremendous tangle of complex physics.

A process that could revolutionise solar energy harvesting has been efficiently demonstrated in solution for the first time. We are only beginning to understand how this process works, and as we learn more we expect improvements in the technology to follow Brian Walker Solar cells offer the opportunity to harvest abundant, renewable energy.

A team of Stanford and SLAC scientists has made the first battery electrode that heals itself, opening a potentially commercially viable path for making the next generation of lithium ion batteries for electric cars, cell phones and other devices. Researchers have made the first battery electrode that heals itself, opening a new and potentially commercially viable path for making the next generation of lithium ion batteries for electric cars, cell phones and other devices.

From the production of tougher, more durable smart phones and other electronic devices, to a wider variety of longer lasting biomedical implants, bulk metallic glasses are poised to be  mainstay materials for the 21 st Century. Featuring a non-crystalline amorphous structure, bulk metallic glasses can be as strong or even stronger than steel, as malleable as plastics,  conduct electricity and resist corrosion.

AUSTIN, Texas — When it comes to the growth of graphene - an ultrathin, ultrastrong, all-carbon material - it is survival of the fittest, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. The team used surface oxygen to grow centimeter-size single graphene crystals on copper. The crystals were about 10,000 times as large as the largest crystals from only four years ago.

Some electrons in a superconducting material behave as if they were in a conventional metal, others as in an unconventional one - depending on the direction of their motion. Understanding the origins of high-temperature superconductivity, the ability of some materials to conduct electricity without any resistance and therefore without loss of energy, is one of the most important quests of modern physics.

MIT researchers make surfaces that are easier to cool under extreme heat; finding could benefit power plants, electronics. When an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, knocking out emergency power supplies, crews sprayed seawater on the reactors to cool them - to no avail.